Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Jan. 10, 2023. (Credit: Vatican Media.)
ROME – Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni spoke at a book presentation on the tenth anniversary of Pope Francis’s election Monday, praising the Argentine pope on several fronts and pledging Italy’s support for the Holy See to negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine.
However, despite her words of admiration and support, Meloni also stood her ground on the migration issue, defending a strict anti-migrant policy known to be at odds with Pope Francis’s policy of welcome and integration.
In her remarks, Meloni recalled the night of Pope Francis’s election to the papacy on March 13, 2013, when he told faithful that his fellow cardinals had gone to the “ends of the earth” to find their new pope.
With this line, Pope Francis “gave us a preview” of his entire papacy, and “perhaps the most distinct trace of his papacy…his most marked aspect is precisely people and places that are far away, on the physical and existential peripheries,” she said.
Meloni then reflected on Pope Francis’s ten year-pontificate and the role his words and teachings have had on her daily work as a politician and now as Italy’s first woman prime minister.
She spoke alongside Vatican Secretary of State Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin at the March 13 presentation of a new book written by Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, a close friend and aide of Pope Francis who has interviewed him several times and travels with the pope on every international trip.
The new book, titled, The Atlas of Francis: Vatican and international politics, explores Francis’s foreign policy amid an increasingly interconnected yet polarized world divided by “a third world war in pieces.”
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