The Diplomat
Pope Francis will receive the Second Vice-President and Minister for Employment, Yolanda Díaz, at 11am tomorrow, Saturday, in the Vatican, according to sources in her department.
Diaz’s visit will take place a few days after it became known that the Executive requested the Vatican’s approval to appoint the former Minister of Education and former spokesperson of the Executive, Isabel Celaá, as the new ambassador to the Holy See.
Sources from Yolanda Díaz’s department told Europa Press that the conversation will focus on matters of “common interest”, in relation to the coronavirus crisis and measures to combat inequality, migratory flows, precarious work and climate change.
Their meeting will take place two months after Yolanda Díaz quoted the Pope on Twitter in a post on Columbus Day, 12 October. In it, the second vice-president defended that it was a day to reflect on the past shared with Latin America and “work to reconcile us, as the @Pontifex (the Pope’s account in English) said”.
The vice-president will not be the first member of the coalition government to be received by Pope Francis. On 24 October 2020, she already held a meeting with the President of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez, who went to the Vatican with his wife, Begoña Gómez.
On that occasion, the two leaders held a 35-minute meeting and the Pontiff warned Sánchez of the danger of “ideologies” that take over” the nation or of “manoeuvres” that do not respond to an act of service.
“It is very sad when ideologies take over the interpretation of a nation, of a country and disfigure the homeland,” Pope Francis said in a speech in front of the Spanish prime minister.
For his part, Sánchez, in a message on Twitter, thanked the Pope for the meeting and highlighted their agreement on “tackling the crisis caused by COVID-19 through multilateralism and with a social outlook; protecting the most vulnerable and moving forward, all of society united, towards a fairer and more united world”.
