Pope Leo urges Monaco, tax haven of billionaires, to help needy
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Pope Leo (left) meeting Prince Albert of Monaco during a private audience in the Prince’s Palace of Monaco in Monte Carlo on March 28.
PHOTO: AFP
MONACO – Pope Leo on March 28 made a day trip to Monaco, a tax-free microstate on the French Riviera known as a haven for billionaires and their luxury yachts, and urged its residents to share their wealth and help those in need.
“In God’s eyes, nothing is received in vain!” the Pope told crowds waving yellow flags under a brilliant sun.
“Every good placed in our hands... bears an intrinsic need not to be held back, but to be shared, so that everyone’s life may be better.”
Pope Leo is the first pope in nearly five centuries to visit the wealthy Mediterranean enclave.
The Vatican said he wanted to show that small countries can make an outsized impact on the world stage.
He arrived after a 90-minute helicopter ride from the Vatican and met first with Prince Albert, Monaco’s head of state and son of the late Hollywood star Grace Kelly.
The Pope appeared to reiterate his message that the wealthy should help those less fortunate in his official gift to Prince Albert.
He gave the prince a colourful artwork created by the Vatican’s mosaic studio, an image of St Francis of Assisi, a 13th-century son of a prosperous Italian merchant who renounced his inheritance to help the poor.
One Monaco resident among crowds greeting Pope Leo outside Prince Albert’s official residence said he hoped the Pope would help bring people across the world together amid the ongoing Iran war.
“At the moment, there is a lot of tension,” said Mr Jean Claude Haddad, 60. “He could reunite people... he brings people together.”
The second smallest state in the world after the Vatican, and one of the last countries with Catholicism as the state religion, Monaco has the highest concentration of billionaires per capita in the world.
In his speech at Prince Albert’s official residence, a 12th-century fortress with lavish apartments overlooking blue-green Mediterranean waters, Pope Leo urged Monaco’s residents to “put your prosperity at the service of law and justice”.
Pope Leo’s events in Monaco were marked by all the usual protocol and pomp of a papal tour abroad.
Crowds, however, were relatively thin. Few lined the streets as he toured the 2.08 sq km country in an open-air “popemobile”.
In a meeting with local Catholics, the Pope appeared to praise Prince Albert’s decision in 2025 to veto a Monaco Bill that would have legalised abortion, firmly opposed by the Church.
Pope Leo urged the Catholics to continue speaking up “in defence of the human person”, using Church terminology often invoked to oppose abortion and the death penalty.
Pope Albert’s 2025 veto was largely symbolic, as abortion is a constitutional right in surrounding France.
Pope Leo, the first US pope, was elected in May to succeed the late Pope Francis as head of the 1.4-billion-member Roman Catholic Church.
His visit to Monaco is only his second outside Italy, but opens what is expected to be a busy year of travel.
Pope Leo, 70, is relatively young and in good health for a pope.
He will undertake an ambitious, four-country tour of Africa in April, and is also due to make a week-long visit to Spain in June. REUTERS
