Pope urges Italy to remain open to migrants during first visit to Rome's presidential palace

Published on 14/10/2025 - 21:17 GMT+2

Pope Leo XIV thanked Italy connected Tuesday for its efforts to combat quality trafficking but urged the state to stay unfastened to welcoming and integrating migrants arsenic helium took portion successful a pomp-filled gathering with the Italian president.

The pontiff completed the rite of transition for each caller pope by travelling crossed Rome to the Quirinal Palace for a gathering with President Sergio Mattarella.

Escorted by the statesmanlike equine honour defender into the palace courtyard, the pope thanked Italy particularly for its invited of pilgrims during the 2025 Holy Year, which has seen millions of other tourists pouring into the Eternal City.

Wearing his ceremonial reddish cape and brocaded stole, the pope thanked Italy for its "generous assistance" to migrants and its efforts to combat quality trafficking.

"I promote you to support live your cognition of openness and solidarity," helium said.

"At the aforesaid time, I privation to emphasise the value of constructive integration of newcomers into the values and traditions of Italian society, truthful that the communal acquisition realised successful this brushwood of peoples whitethorn genuinely enrich and payment all."

It was a notation to Italy’s relation astatine crushed zero successful Europe's migration debate, fixed its proximity to North Africa, making it the preferred destination for smuggling operations mounting disconnected from Libya and Tunisia.

The right-wing authorities of Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni has made cracking down connected amerciable migration a priority, including by sending migrants backmost location oregon to detention facilities successful Albania and prosecuting alleged smugglers.

Meloni and her hard-line Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini were successful the beforehand enactment of the audience, held successful a gilded reception country of the palace with palace guards lasting astatine attention.

Italy's hard-line stance connected migration often conflicted with the erstwhile Pope Francis' telephone for wealthier countries to welcome, support and integrate newcomers, a presumption Pope Leo XIV repeated arsenic precocious arsenic past week successful his archetypal main teaching document.

Tuesday's brushwood was grounds of the adjacent ties betwixt Italy and the Vatican. The determination itself underscored the unsocial and intertwined relationship.

The Quirinale Palace was for centuries the summertime residence of popes until 1870, erstwhile Rome was captured from the papal states and annexed into the recently unified Kingdom of Italy.

After decades successful which popes were fundamentally prisoners of the Vatican, Italy and the Holy See normalised relations successful 1929 with the Lateran Treaty, which is inactive successful effect.