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VATICAN CITY: Pope Benedict XVI will
receive US President George W. Bush in June, Vatican spokesman
Federico Lombardi said on Sunday.
The audience will
take place around the dates of a G8 summit in Germany from June 6 to
8 which Bush is attending, he said.
“The meeting is
planned as part of the American president’s journey to Europe in
June, but no exact date has been fixed,” Lombardi told AFP.
Bush, a member of
the Methodist Church, became the first US president to attend a
pope’s funeral when John Paul II died in April 2005.
He has not been
received in the Vatican in the two years since, but his wife Laura
was granted a private audience by Benedict in February 2006.
In his Easter
blessing last Sunday Benedict said that “nothing positive comes
from Iraq.”
The country is
“torn apart by continual slaughter as the civilian population
flees,” the pope said in his traditional “Urbi et Orbi” (to
the city and the world) blessing from the loggia of St Peter’s
Basilica.
The pope speaks
rarely about the situation in Iraq, where attacks continue in and
around Baghdad despite a massive security operation since February
14 to quell daily bloodshed in the Iraqi capital that has left
thousands dead in the last year alone.
The late John
Paul II was a firm opponent of the Iraq war.
 --AFP
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