Muscat family in private meeting with Pope Francis

Yesterday morning, the family of outgoing Prime Minister Joseph Muscat met Pope Francis at the Vatican in a private visit.

The Department of Information described it as “a last private visit” as Muscat is to resign in January.

The visit was supposed to be official but it was later relegated to a private occasion after the PM announced his resignation in the wake of his office’s involvement in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Sources had told this newsroom that a state visit had been planned, in which Muscat would have been accompanied by the Foreign Affairs Minister and the Maltese Ambassador. However, it was changed to a private visit to which the media was not invited.

Pressure had been mounting on Pope Francis not to meet Muscat, as the Maltese government sinks deeper into the scandal surrounding the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. A petition urging people to write to Pope Francis, asking him not to meet Muscat, has been doing the rounds on social media. On Wednesday, a group of 22 academics urged the Pope not to receive the outgoing Prime Minister and to distance himself from this “propaganda exercise”. The letter was also sent to the Apostolic Nuncio in Malta.

On Friday, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte cancelled a lunch meeting he had scheduled with Muscat.

A spokesperson for the Italian Premier said that the meeting had been cancelled because of other commitments that had cropped up on the Italian PM’s agenda.

It is unusual that pre-scheduled meetings between heads of government are cancelled at such a late stage, barely 24 hours before they are due to be held.

Observers said that although Conte’s official reply is that other meetings came up, it is likely that the one with Muscat was cancelled because of the prevailing situation in Malta. Choosing ‘other commitments’ over a meeting with another head of state is a strong message, the observers noted.

On Friday evening, Muscat pulled out of a EuroMed event in Rome at the very last minute.

He was due to speak about migration at the MED 2019 conference, an annual high-level initiative promoted by the Italian government. However, he dropped out, leaving Foreign Affairs Minister Carmelo Abela to represent Malta at the event.