Pope Francis and Giorgia Meloni have never met, but they’re destined to achieve this after she becomes Italy’s first female prime minister and leader of the country’s most far-right-wing government since World War II later this month.
There’s much speculation about how they are going to relate to one another. Their positions on the migrant query seem like diametrically opposed. Her nationalist identity politics and her understanding of Christianity appears to exclude relatively than include and communicate a really different vision to that of Francis. At the identical time, she, just like the pope, could be very concerned in regards to the low birthrate in Italy and desires to extend that. They each see the necessity to create jobs in order that young, qualified people shouldn’t have to depart the country.
There’s much speculation about how Pope Francis and Giorgia Meloni will relate to one another. Their positions on the migrant query seem like diametrically opposed.
Given all this, Vatican sources contacted by America (who wish to stay anonymous because they are usually not authorized to talk on the topic) imagine that the 85-year-old pope and the 45-year-old soon-to-be prime minister of Italy could actually develop a constructive relationship.
Ms. Meloni has spoken little since she won the election and as a substitute has emphasized that since she now has “great responsibility,” she needs to talk fastidiously, an attitude appreciated within the Vatican, sources told America.
“The Vatican doesn’t seek to influence or interfere in Italian politics. Its doors are at all times open to all, from the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, to the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, they usually shall be open to Giorgia Meloni,” one senior Vatican official said.
He added, “Meloni is a one that has an idea of Christianity that’s ‘sui generis,’ and I feel that we must not judge nor jump to conclusions before seeing how she moves.”
In her autobiography, Io sono Giorgia (“I’m Giorgia”), Ms. Meloni wrote about her life and her faith.
“Meloni is a one that has an idea of Christianity that’s ‘sui generis,’ and I feel that we must not judge nor jump to conclusions before seeing how she moves.”
Within the section of the book entitled “I’m Christian,” she begins by saying, “I owe all the pieces to my mother.” She reveals that her mother, Anna, gave birth to her on the age of 23, resisting pressures to have an abortion. She describes her grandmother Maria as “very devout” and recalls how she and Arianna, her older sister, accompanied their grandmother to Mass every Saturday evening. She says her father, an atheist who left the family when she was very young, objected to having the 2 girls baptized, but Father Guido, the parish priest of the church they attended, convinced her mother to have them baptized when she was 6 years old.
The “saintly” Father Guido took great care of his flock and saved many from drugs and bad companions, she recalls. “It’s because of him that I started to come back near God.” Since then, she says, “my dialogue with God has never ceased.” She and her sister served as altar girls. She developed an incredible devotion to her guardian angel, “a guide, a counselor and one’s best friend,” whom she sometimes identifies with conscience. She will not be married but has a six-year-old daughter, Ginevra, along with her partner, a journalist who works in the tv world; she reveals that each night she recites a prayer to the guardian angel along with her daughter as she puts her to sleep.
Ms. Meloni describes St. John Paul II as “one other very great man” (like Father Guido), and “the best pope of the trendy era.” He had a substantial impact on her because “with simplicity and his powerful example, he brought me near God.” She met him 4 times, in her political role as city councilor. Her first encounter with him, on the age of 21, was “electrifying,” she writes. She was profoundly touched by how he “heroically” endured suffering in his last years and went to pay her respects when he died in 2005. She wept on that occasion.
Meloni reveals: “I admit that I actually have not at all times understood Pope Francis.”
She reveals: “I actually have followed every pope, but not with the identical enthusiasm. It might also be a matter of age, and the notice that comes with it, but although being Catholic and having never allowed myself to criticize a pope, I admit that I actually have not at all times understood Pope Francis. At times I actually have felt like a lost sheep, and I hope that sooner or later I could have the privilege of with the ability to speak with him, because I’m certain that his big eyes and his straight talk will find a way to provide intending to [make sense of] what I don’t understand.”
In a big paragraph from her book, she declares, “I actually have never ceased to imagine in God. However the intimate dimension is so very personal that it cannot and must not be used as a paradigm of a collective political movement or indeed of a nation. My faith in God is imperfect, doubtful, painful, nevertheless it is mine and only mine.” She adds: “Due to God I actually have chosen to be an honest person, convinced that He sees and recognizes—also on this life and never only in the following—those that decide to be on his side. And it’s because of Him that I actually have understood that every of us has a mission in life.”
In the sunshine of all this, it’s interesting to listen to a few of what she said on the campaign trail. Much of it was summed up in a speech she gave at a rally in Piazza San Giovanni, Rome, in October of 2019: “I’m Giorgia. I’m a girl. I’m a mother. I’m a Christian. We’ll defend God, the fatherland and the family from Islamization.”
She brought the gang to its feet when she shouted, “Yes to sexual identity, no to the ideology of gender! Yes to the universality of the cross, no to Islamic violence!”
Again, speaking in Marbella, Spain, last June, at a rally in favor of Vox, the acute right-wing Spanish political party, Ms. Meloni identified herself as “a girl, a mother, an Italian and Christian.” She brought the gang to its feet when she shouted, “Yes to the natural family, no to LGBT lobbies! Yes to sexual identity, no to the ideology of gender! Yes to the universality of the cross, no to Islamic violence! Yes to secure frontiers, no to massive migration!”
She takes pride within the undeniable fact that she will not be only Italian but in addition European. So far the allies she has courted within the 27 member states of the European Union seem like on the proper or the far right of the political spectrum, chief amongst them the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban. She hopes with their aid, and that of other right-wing parties, to bring about change within the European Union to the advantage of the sovereign national states over the union’s central government in Brussels.
Ms. Meloni involves power because the war in Ukraine rages, but she is adamant in affirming Italy’s total support for Ukraine against Russian aggression, along with NATO and the European Union. She took this stance on the eve of becoming prime minister, despite the fact that the leaders of the 2 other parties that form her center-right coalition, the League of Matteo Salvini and the Forward Italy party of the media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, have very close relations to the Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Ms. Meloni, who was minister for youth in Berlusconi’s government in 2008 and can now lead the seventieth Italian government since 1946, may actually encounter more problems within the immediate future along with her political allies within the coalition than with the pope or the Catholic Church.
For his part, Pope Francis has left Italian politics to the Italian bishops’ conference, and its president, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, who could be very near Francis, knows her. The cardinal expressed his openness to her and said he will not be concerned that she is leader of a post-fascist movement, Brothers of Italy, nor does he fear the return of fascism in Italy. Chatting with journalists, he expressed his personal respect for her and said he recognizes that her role as prime minister is “particularly difficult” at this moment in history given the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis linked to it, in addition to economic problems because the country emerges from the pandemic.
Cardinal Zuppi hopes the brand new government will work for “the common good” not for “particular interests” and said he’ll monitor closely the way it addresses the issues of “poverty, inequality, young people and the elderly, the environment, the demographic winter, the reception of migrants, and the constructing of a more just and inclusive society.” Just like the Vatican, he’s taking a “wait and see” approach, knowing well that not just a few Catholics in Italy have welcomed Meloni’s victory.
