VATICAN CITY: French President Emmanuel Macron arrived Friday at the Vatican for his first meeting with Pope Leo XIV, a private audience expected to be dominated by the Iran war.<\/p>\n
The French leader, who arrived with his wife Brigitte after flying to Rome on Thursday, will meet the US pontiff and the Vatican\u2019s secretary of state, Pietro Parolin.<\/p>\n
Macron and the leader of the world\u2019s 1.4 billion Catholics were due above all to discuss \u201cthe resolution of the crisis in the Middle East,\u201d a spokesman for Macron\u2019s office told reporters.<\/p>\n
They are particularly focused on Lebanon, where deadly Israeli strikes threatened this week\u2019s temporary truce between the US and Iran.<\/p>\n
Leo XIV visited Lebanon late last year as part of his first trip abroad, which also included Turkiye, and has repeatedly prayed for the victims of conflict there.<\/p>\n
Macron has also made numerous appeals for Lebanon to be included in the ceasefire.<\/p>\n
He discussed the conflict on Thursday evening with representatives of the Catholic community of Sant\u2019Egidio, an informal diplomatic channel of the Holy See that is very active on Middle Eastern and humanitarian issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cMacron is a man of peace,\u201d and \u201ccan do a lot\u201d to \u201csupport\u201d the Lebanese authorities, the community\u2019s founder, Andrea Riccardi, told reporters, adding that Lebanon \u201cmust not be left alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
In recent days, both Macron and the Chicago-born pontiff have spoken out against US President Donald Trump over the war, which began with Israel-US attacks on Iran.<\/p>\n
Leo condemned as \u201cunacceptable\u201d threats to civilian targets \u2014 while not citing Trump by name \u2014 while Macron said there was \u201ctoo much talk, and it\u2019s all over the place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both welcomed the truce and have urged a diplomatic solution to the war, which has expanded across the Middle East and roiled the global economy.<\/p>\n
The US government on Thursday denied a report that the Vatican\u2019s US envoy was summoned in January for a \u201cbitter\u201d dressing down over a speech by the pope condemning \u201cdiplomacy based on force,\u201d in remarks widely viewed as aimed at the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
Macron is not a practicing Catholic but had a good relationship with Leo\u2019s predecessor, Pope Francis, meeting him three times and discussing with him both global crises and spirituality.<\/p>\n
Their relationship also had its tensions, with the late Argentine criticizing the inclusion of abortion in the French constitution, and Macron\u2019s proposal to introduce assisted dying in France.<\/p>\n
The president is expected to invite Leo, a more reserved character than his predecessor, to visit France soon.<\/p>\n
Francis never made a state visit to France and declined to attend the opening of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2024, five years after its devastation by fire.<\/p>\n
Friday\u2019s meeting at the Vatican comes three days before the pope\u2019s visit to the former French colony of Algeria, the first ever by a pontiff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
VATICAN CITY: French President Emmanuel Macron arrived Friday at the Vatican for his first meeting with Pope Leo XIV, a private audience expected to be dominated by the Iran war. The French leader, who arrived with his wife Brigitte after flying to Rome on Thursday, will meet the US pontiff and the Vatican\u2019s secretary of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":96175,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96163"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96176,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96163\/revisions\/96176"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}