His Holiness was speaking to the diplomats regarding further reasons for his choosing the name Francis: to get close to and love and help the poor, to forge peace with the truth, and to build bridges among peoples and religions with particular mention of Islam and atheism. At the end of the discourse he also spoke of the need to care for the entire Earth (sic).
Here is the relevant text (my translation with help from Google Chrome).
As you know, there are various reasons why I chose my name thinking of Francis of Assisi, a personality that is well-known beyond the borders of Italy and Europe, and even among those who do not profess the Catholic faith. One of the first reasons is the love that Francis had for the poor. There are still many poor people in the world! And how much suffering these people encounter! With the example of Francis of Assisi, the Church has always tried to take care of, to guard, in every corner of the Earth, those who suffer from poverty; and I think that in many of your countries, you can see the generous work of those Christians who try to help the sick, the orphans, the homeless and those who are marginalized, and are working so to build a more humane and more just society.
But there is another poverty! It is the spiritual poverty of our days, which severely affects countries also considered the richest. This is what my Predecessor, our beloved Pope Benedict XVI calls the "dictatorship of relativism", which places each person as a measure of himself and endangers societal life. And so I come to the second reason for my name. Francis of Assisi tells us to work to build peace! But there is no true peace without truth! There can be no true peace if each is the measure of himself, if each one can claim always and only their own right, not caring at the same time for the benefit of others, of all, based on the nature common to every human being on this earth.
One of the titles of the Bishop of Rome is Pontiff, that is the person who builds bridges, with God and among men. I desire that the dialogue between us help build bridges among all people, so that everyone can find in the other not an enemy, not a competitor, but a brother to accept and embrace! Furthermore, my own origins compel me to work to build bridges. In fact, as you know, my family is of Italian origin, and so in me this dialogue between cultures and places far distant from one another is always alive, including one world leader with another other. today ever closer, interdependent and needing to meet and to create real spaces of authentic fraternity.
In this work the role of religion is crucial. You can not, in fact, build bridges between people, forgetting God But the opposite is also true: you can not live real ties with God, ignoring the others. For this reason it is important to intensify the dialogue between the various religions, I think first of all of that with Islam, and I very much appreciated the presence, during the Mass of the beginning of my ministry, many civil and religious authorities of the Islamic world. And it is also important to strengthen the encounters with non-believers, the differences that separate and hurt should not prevail, but, within the diversity, the desire to build real bonds of friendship between all peoples should prevail.
