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The Pope’s schedule for 2020 does not include any trips abroad, the Vatican has announced.
His zero-trip 2020 is very different from the way he spent 2019: then, Francis – who is in his eighties – made a record seven international trips to eleven different countries.
“At the present time, and in view of the international health situation, there are no plans for the Holy Father to travel abroad this year,” Matteo Bruni from the Holy See Press Office says.
Francis has made only one trip outside of Rome this year. That was in February for a speaking engagement at the southern Italian city of Bari.
Since his election as pope in 2013, Francis has travelled to nearly 50 countries and to many parts of Italy.
The French government had hoped Francis might attend the third annual Paris Peace Forum in November – an international event focusing on global governance and multilateralism.
Although Francis’s invitation has not yet been formalised by the French president, Bruni says “it has been mentioned in the meetings of recent days”.
When French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian was in Rome earlier this month, he discussed the possibility of the Pope’s schedule for this year including a papal visit with Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.
“The President of the Republic would like Pope Francis to come to this forum, one of the major themes of which will be global health and the response to the pandemic,” Le Drian said in an interview published on June 16.
“The Supreme Pontiff’s voice in this forum on the theme of global public goods and the global public good represented by future treatments and vaccines, would be far-reaching,”.
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the reflection on the reconstruction of a more just world were at the heart of a telephone conversation between French President Emmanuel Macron and the pope on 21 April.
“The pope told us that he felt that he was in front of leaders who were suddenly confronted with fear and experiencing worry,” says Father Bruno-Marie Duffé, secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
“He invited them to hope, not to only be crisis managers, to see that it is not so much a question of preparing for the future as of preparing the future,”.
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