✣ Trump to meet Pope Francis for first time
What happened? The Vatican has confirmed that Pope Francis will meet President Trump later this month. Trump will visit Israel and Saudi Arabia before going to the Vatican, then on to Brussels for a Nato summit and then Sicily for a G7 meeting. The papal audience will take place at 8.30am on a Wednesday, “squeezed in”, said Reuters, before the Pope’s weekly general audience. A few days earlier, Francis had said that he was not aware of any request from Trump for a meeting. What the British media are saying The Press focused on what Newsweek called the “short-but-rocky relationship” between the two leaders. It quoted the Pope’s apparent allusion to Trump’s planned Mexican wall: “A person who thinks only about building walls … and not building bridges, is not Christian.” Trump responded: “No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith.” The Independent said that “things might get awkward when the blustering American president and the soft-spoken pontiff touch base”, citing their differences over immigration and climate change. Francis released an encyclical “calling on Christians to protect the planet”, it noted, while Trump “openly mocked climate change”, even saying it was “a hoax created by China”. What the vaticanisti are saying The Catholic press said much the same; Rocco Palmo at Whispers in the Loggia wrote of “a history of direct and prominent clashes that knows no precedent”, while noting that Trump’s presidency was “made possible by the Republican’s win of a majority among white American Catholics”. Pete Baklinski observed on LifeSiteNews that soon after Trump was sworn in, Francis said pointedly that “Hitler didn’t steal power, his people voted for him, and then he destroyed his people.” But while accepting that they are “a study in contrasts – Francis the man of simplicity and humility, Trump an icon of bombast”, John Allen at Crux speculated: “Despite it all, Francis and Trump may just hit it off.” Both, he argued, are “anti-establishment figures” shaking up “entrenched ways of doing business”.
