Pope asks Merkel to fight for Paris pact

VATICAN CITY — German Chancellor Angela Merkel says Pope Francis encouraged her to work to preserve the Paris climate accord despite the U.S. withdrawal and shared her aim to “bring down walls,” not build them.

Merkel and Francis met Saturday in the Apostolic Palace, focusing on the Group of 20 summit that Germany is hosting in Hamburg on July 7 and 8. The Vatican said the talks focused on the need for the international community to combat poverty, hunger, terrorism and climate change.

Merkel said she briefed the pope on Germany’s G-20 agenda, which she added “assumes that we are a world in which we want to work together multilaterally, a world in which we don’t want to build walls but bring down walls.”

Francis has consistently called for nations to build bridges not walls — including in reference to the border wall the Trump administration wants to build with Mexico. Merkel said Francis encouraged her to fight for international agreements, including the 2015 Paris climate accord, which aims to curb heattrapping emissions.

“We know that regrettably, the United States is leaving this accord,” Merkel said.

As he did when President Trump visited last month, Francis gave Merkel a copy of his environmental encyclical, “Praise Be,” which casts fighting climate change and caring for the environment as an urgent moral obligation.

Francis issued the encyclical in the run-up to the Paris negotiations in hopes of urging a global consensus on the need to change the “perverse” development models that he said had enriched the wealthy at the expense of the poor and turned God’s creation into an “immense pile of filth.”

The audience began with Francis expressing his condolences over the death of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl. In his formal note of condolences, Francis called Kohl a “great statesman.”