New president to make Vatican first foreign visit

The newly elected president of Portugal will be visiting the Vatican on his first foreign trip since taking office.

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s audience with Pope Francis was due to take place on the morning of 17 March. He was then scheduled to meet the Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Portuguese clergy in Rome.

The President (pictured right) has said he wants to be a guarantee of religious freedom in Portugal and made headlines by including a meeting with representatives of 18 different religious groups as part of his inauguration ceremony on 9 March.

 The meeting, which was attended by the Patriarch of Lisbon, was held in a ceremonial hall in Lisbon’s main mosque.

Representatives of each religious community read out a universal prayer for peace, following which the President made a short speech, in which he affirmed the importance of religious liberty and expressed his hope that “the following five years may be lived in the light of the same peace, justice and fraternity which your words expressed here today”.

Leaders of Lisbon’s Muslim community called the event unprecedented and the Patriarch told journalists that the inter-religious event was a good sign which showed the President wanted to “count on the different religions as agents of peace, which is essentially what they are”.

Mr Rebelo de Sousa is a practising Catholic and claims to pray the rosary daily. He came under fire during his campaign after admitting that he would not have vetoed recent legislation liberalising abortion and legalising gay adoption, but won the election comfortably in one round.