Matteo Salvini meets Cardinal Raymond Burke, the Pope’s fiercest critic in the Vatican
The Guardian: Matteo Salvini, the far-right Italian interior minister who once questioned Pope Francis’s legitimacy, has met Raymond Burke, the Argentinian pontiff’s fiercest critic in the Vatican, signalling an unprecedented gulf between the leader of the Catholic church and a key figure in the new populist government.
Salvini, the leader of the League party, has long been at odds with Francis over the issue of migration, the pope’s outreach to Muslims and his calls for Europe to integrate migrant communities.
The rift seemed to take a turn for the worse late last week, when a photograph emerged of an amicable meeting between Salvini and Burke, a staunch conservative.
#CardinalBurke meets the Italy’s deputy prime minister and Interior Minister @matteosalvinimi in Rome pic.twitter.com/1VHre12zPl
— Fabio M. Ragona (@FabioMRagona) June 15, 2018
It was not their first encounter. The pair have met on two other occasions, according to a Vatican watcher who is close to Burke. The US cardinal, one of four to sign an openly critical letter to Francis last year questioning guidance that allows priests to determine whether remarried Catholics could receive communion, has praised Donald Trump and adopted a far more critical stance on migrants than the pope.
