VATICAN CITY: US Secretary of State Marco \u200bRubio expects a \u201cfrank\u201d meeting with Pope Leo during a visit to the Vatican on Thursday, the US ambassador said, after President Donald Trump took a fresh pot-shot at the pope for criticizing the US-Israeli war in Iran.<\/p>\n
\u201cNations have disagreements, and I think one of the ways that you work through those is … through fraternity and authentic dialogue,\u201d Brian Burch, the US ambassador to the Holy See, said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the secretary is coming here in that spirit,\u201d Burch told journalists. \u201cTo have a frank conversation about US policy, to engage in dialogue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has repeatedly disparaged the first US-born pope in recent weeks, drawing \u200ca backlash from \u200cChristian leaders across the political spectrum.<\/p>\n
In his latest comments, Trump told \u200bright-wing \u200cradio \u2060talk show \u200bhost Hugh \u2060Hewitt that \u201cthe Pope would rather talk about the fact that it\u2019s okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and I don\u2019t think that\u2019s very good.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think he\u2019s endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people. But I guess if it\u2019s up to the Pope, he thinks it\u2019s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
Leo has never said Iran should have nuclear weapons, but has opposed the war which Trump says is aimed at ending Iran\u2019s nuclear program.<\/p>\n
Responding to Trump\u2019s latest attack \u2060later on Tuesday, Leo said he wanted to spread the Christian message \u200cby speaking about peace but that people were free to criticize \u200chim.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe mission of the Church is to preach the Gospel, \u200bto preach peace,\u201d said the pope. \u201cIf someone wants \u200cto criticize me for preaching the Gospel … I hope simply to be listened to because of the \u200cvalue of God\u2019s words.\u201d<\/p>\n
Leo also firmly rejected the idea that he supported nuclear weapons, which the Catholic Church teaches are immoral. \u201cThe Church has spoken out for years against all nuclear arms, on that there is no doubt,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
VATICAN CITY: US Secretary of State Marco \u200bRubio expects a \u201cfrank\u201d meeting with Pope Leo during a visit to the Vatican on Thursday, the US ambassador said, after President Donald Trump took a fresh pot-shot at the pope for criticizing the US-Israeli war in Iran. \u201cNations have disagreements, and I think one of the ways …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":97343,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97333","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\/97333","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=97333"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97344,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97333\/revisions\/97344"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}