(Bloomberg) -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel added Pope Francis to her expanding diplomatic push on Saturday, stepping away from euro-area crisis negotiations to promote her global agenda on combating climate change, disease and poverty.
Francis, head of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, granted Merkel her second private audience since he took office less than two years ago.
The 40-minute meeting was a chance for Merkel to share a stage with the popular pontiff and to draw attention to matters such as child vaccination and global warming that will be topics when she hosts other leaders of the Group of Seven advanced economies in Bavaria in June.
“It was a very enriching talk, I wouldn’t have expected otherwise,” Merkel told reporters in Rome after the meeting. The audience “encourages us in the German presidency to decisively seek concrete results and to implement them.”
As the German leader has shuttled between continents grappling with crises in Ukraine and Greece, the Vatican was the 10th country on Merkel’s schedule in three weeks. For the pope, meeting the leader of Europe’s biggest economy is a way to extend his own foray into politics.
Ukraine Crisis
Merkel and Francis discussed the crisis in Ukraine, as negotiators cling to a fragile cease-fire that the German leader yesterday called the only path forward to peace.
They underlined ’’in particular, the commitment to reaching a peaceful solution to the conflict in Ukraine,’’ according to a statement posted on the Holy See’s website.
Merkel also held talks with Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin and then attended a reception held by the Community of Sant’Egidio, a lay Catholic movement devoted to church work and charity.
“If anybody in Europe has a claim to the pope’s ear these days, it’d be Angela Merkel,” John Wauck, a professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, said by phone.
‘Grave Criticism’
Francis has criticized Europe’s response to a wave of refugees from northern Africa, a humanitarian crisis that’s struck Italy in particular. At least 300 people trying to make their way to Italy from Libya went missing this month, the United Nations Refugee Agency said on Feb. 11.
In an address to the European Parliament in November, Francis warned against turning the Mediterranean Sea into a “vast graveyard.”
“Criticism like that weighs gravely, of course,” Merkel said in her weekly video interview on Feb. 14, responding to the pope’s remarks. “And indeed the situation in the Mediterranean is very unsatisfactory.”
The daughter of a Lutheran pastor who moved to communist East Germany in the 1950s, Merkel has a domestic interest in friendly relations with the Holy See: her Christian Democratic Union party has a churchgoing base of Catholics and Protestants.
She caused unease among Catholic party members when she criticized German-born Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 for reinstating Richard Williamson, a bishop who denied the Holocaust.
In a sign of improving ties after Benedict’s departure, Merkel attended the inauguration of Pope Francis in March 2013.
Two months later, she had her first audience with the Argentine-born pope, who did graduate work in Frankfurt in 1986 and speaks German. Merkel suggested that next time “we’ll go to the piazza and have a pizza,” Bild newspaper reported at the time.
bloomberg.com
Francis, head of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, granted Merkel her second private audience since he took office less than two years ago.
The 40-minute meeting was a chance for Merkel to share a stage with the popular pontiff and to draw attention to matters such as child vaccination and global warming that will be topics when she hosts other leaders of the Group of Seven advanced economies in Bavaria in June.
“It was a very enriching talk, I wouldn’t have expected otherwise,” Merkel told reporters in Rome after the meeting. The audience “encourages us in the German presidency to decisively seek concrete results and to implement them.”
As the German leader has shuttled between continents grappling with crises in Ukraine and Greece, the Vatican was the 10th country on Merkel’s schedule in three weeks. For the pope, meeting the leader of Europe’s biggest economy is a way to extend his own foray into politics.
Ukraine Crisis
Merkel and Francis discussed the crisis in Ukraine, as negotiators cling to a fragile cease-fire that the German leader yesterday called the only path forward to peace.
They underlined ’’in particular, the commitment to reaching a peaceful solution to the conflict in Ukraine,’’ according to a statement posted on the Holy See’s website.
Merkel also held talks with Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin and then attended a reception held by the Community of Sant’Egidio, a lay Catholic movement devoted to church work and charity.
“If anybody in Europe has a claim to the pope’s ear these days, it’d be Angela Merkel,” John Wauck, a professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, said by phone.
‘Grave Criticism’
Francis has criticized Europe’s response to a wave of refugees from northern Africa, a humanitarian crisis that’s struck Italy in particular. At least 300 people trying to make their way to Italy from Libya went missing this month, the United Nations Refugee Agency said on Feb. 11.
In an address to the European Parliament in November, Francis warned against turning the Mediterranean Sea into a “vast graveyard.”
“Criticism like that weighs gravely, of course,” Merkel said in her weekly video interview on Feb. 14, responding to the pope’s remarks. “And indeed the situation in the Mediterranean is very unsatisfactory.”
The daughter of a Lutheran pastor who moved to communist East Germany in the 1950s, Merkel has a domestic interest in friendly relations with the Holy See: her Christian Democratic Union party has a churchgoing base of Catholics and Protestants.
She caused unease among Catholic party members when she criticized German-born Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 for reinstating Richard Williamson, a bishop who denied the Holocaust.
In a sign of improving ties after Benedict’s departure, Merkel attended the inauguration of Pope Francis in March 2013.
Two months later, she had her first audience with the Argentine-born pope, who did graduate work in Frankfurt in 1986 and speaks German. Merkel suggested that next time “we’ll go to the piazza and have a pizza,” Bild newspaper reported at the time.
bloomberg.com
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