VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis will meet with U.S. President Joe Biden and eight other heads of state in a series of private bilateral meetings during the Group of Seven (G7) summit to be held in southern Italy on June 13-15, according to a schedule published by the Vatican Secretariat.
The pope will also address government leaders and representatives of European and international organizations during an “outreach” discussion on artificial intelligence on June 14, and he will meet privately with the head of the International Monetary Fund.
The Pope is scheduled to arrive by helicopter in Borgo Egnazia in the Puglia region at 12:30 pm local time on June 14. He will be welcomed by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as Italy is hosting the annual summit this year.
Pope Francis will then hold his first series of bilateral meetings with: International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; French President Emmanuel Macron; and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
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After delivering a speech during a session dedicated to artificial intelligence, the pope will hold a final series of bilateral talks with Kenyan President William Ruto; Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi; Biden; Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan; and Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
“At the G7 we will talk about artificial intelligence, but also about peace,” the Pope told reporters at Rome’s Salesian University last Tuesday, June 4. He also told some friends that “before we talk about artificial intelligence, we must talk about natural intelligence.”
The Pope is scheduled to depart before 8pm local time and return to the Vatican after 9pm.
The G7 includes the United States, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and Great Britain. The European Union also participates in all discussions through its representatives: the presidents of both the European Council and the European Commission.
The host country usually invites other leaders to attend some of the G-7 sessions and this year Pope Francis, King Abdullah II of Jordan and the leaders of Argentina, the United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Mauritania and other countries were invited to attend.
Although Argentine President Javier Mailey will be attending the G-7 meeting as a guest, America It is learnt that she did not request a bilateral meeting with the Pope. The two had a private meeting at the Vatican on February 12 after Argentina’s first female saint, Mama Antula, was canonised.
“This is the first time a Pope is participating in the work of the Group of Seven and it will bring prestige to Italy and the entire @G7,” Meloni wrote in an April 26 post that included a video announcement.
In the video, he called artificial intelligence “the greatest anthropological challenge of our time”, and said legal mechanisms are needed to make it “human-centred and human-controlled”.
The Prime Minister said that in discussing the issue, she would like Government leaders to benefit from the ethical reflections that the Vatican has been promoting since 2020 with its “Rome Call for AI Ethics”, a project coordinated by the Pontifical Academy for Life, signed by top leaders of Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and other major companies in the sector.
AmericaVatican correspondent Gerard O’Connell contributed to this report.
