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Official visit to the Holy See, Swiss Guard and Istituto Svizzero
On 12 November, Alain Berset is received in audience by Pope Francis, five months after the Pope’s visit to Geneva. They discuss peace, human rights and international humanitarian law, a hundred years after the end of the First World War. With the Cardinal Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin, and Archbishop Paul R. Gallagher, he discusses crisis areas, migration and the fight against human trafficking.
He then visits the Pontifical Swiss Guard, whose numbers are increasing and whose barracks are to be rebuilt. Before the guards, he jokes about the British minister Philip Hammond, who saw robots replacing the government: the Guard, for its part, is irreplaceable. “Acriter et Fideliter!”
The evening before, he had visited the Swiss Institute in Rome, at the Villa Maraini. He pays tribute there to a palace built on a former rubbish dump: “eine ideale Lage für kreative Arbeit”.
Sunday 11 November 2018 — Rome
- Evening at the Swiss Institute in Rome (Villa Maraini), meeting with the institute’s members, address
Monday 12 November 2018 — Vatican City
- Official welcome at the Vatican
- Audience with Pope Francis
- Meeting with the Cardinal Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin, and Archbishop Paul R. Gallagher, Secretary for Relations with States
- Press conference
- Visit to the Pontifical Swiss Guard: welcome by Commander Christoph Graf, address, meal with the guards, visit to the armoury
Speeches on this site
- Allocution devant la Garde suisse pontificale (in German, French-language page)
- Allocution à l’Istituto Svizzero de Rome (in German, French-language page)
Sources