With Gift and in Conversation, Vatican Presses Trump on Climate Change -
By MARK LANDLER and JASON HOROWITZMAY 24, 2017
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis put climate change on the agenda of his first meeting with President Trump on Wednesday,
and the subject is likely to come up again and again in the president’s encounters with other world leaders in the coming days.
The pope presented the president with a copy of his influential encyclical on preserving the environment, while in a broader meeting, Cardinal
Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, urged Mr. Trump not to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord.
Francis replied, “It is with all hope that you may become an olive tree to make peace.”
As he bade the pope farewell, Mr. Trump told him, “I won’t forget what you said.”
For Mr. Trump, who came here after stops in Saudi Arabia
and Israel, the visit to the Vatican capped a tour of the ancestral homes of three of the world’s great monotheistic religions.
After posing for a picture — “protocol,” the pope murmured — Mr. Trump took a seat across a wooden desk from Francis.
“We had a good exchange on the difficulty of balancing addressing climate change, and ensuring
that you still have a thriving economy and you can still offer people jobs so they can feed their families.”
In their first encounter, the pope and the president, two men with starkly different worldviews, sought to
bridge the chasm between them with a handshake, a private audience and a mutual pledge to work for peace.
