Past insult aside, Argentine leader, pontiff hit it off
ROME — Despite their rocky start, Argentina’s President Javier Milei and Pope Francis appeared to have hit it off as they held their first meeting Monday amid speculation that the Argentine pontiff might finally go home for a visit later this year.
The Vatican said the two men met for 1 hour, 10 minutes, an unusually long audience by Francis’ standards, especially given no translation was required. Vatican video showed a smiling Francis briefly grasping Milei’s arm for support as they walked to his desk at the start of their meeting.
Milei, who once called the pope an “imbecile,” gave Francis some of his favorite Argentine dulce de leche alfajor cookies and lemon biscuits. Francis presented him with the documents of his papacy and a medallion.
“One of the things that I’ve come to understand, among other things, is that the pope is the Argentine who is the most important person in the country,” Milei said in an interview broadcast Monday by Italy’s Retequattro.
A warm tone was already set the previous day, when Milei embraced Francis with a bear hug at the end of a Mass to declare Argentina’s first female saint. A beaming pope quipped, “You cut your hair!”
Milei’s office posted photos of the embrace on X and wrote: “May God bless Argentines and may the forces of heaven accompany us.”
It wasn’t always so. Milei, a self-proclaimed libertarian and anarcho-capitalist who is promising a wave of austerity measures to revive Argentina’s economy, described Francis as an “imbecile” during the election campaign that brought him to office. He called Francis “the representative of malignance on Earth.”
Francis, who has also lamented Argentina’s prolonged economic crisis, appeared to have forgiven him and brushed off the criticism as mere campaign rhetoric.