Gordon Brown will invite the Pope to visit Britain when he has an audience with the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Vatican today. Downing Street announced yesterday that the Prime Minister will meet with Pope Benedict XVI to discuss "development issues" when Mr Brown travels to Italy.
Mr Brown will be meeting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Rome for talks later the same day, focusing on issues to be addressed at the G20 summit in London in April.
Mr Brown's spokesman told reporters he was travelling to Rome primarily to meet Mr Berlusconi, currently chairman of the G7 group of industrialised nations.
The meeting will be Mr Brown's first with the Pope since he became Prime Minister, although they met twice when he was Chancellor.
The last time the two met, while promoting a scheme to provide life-saving vaccines to children in the developing world, Mr Brown gave the Pope a book of sermons by his father, a Church of Scotland minister. On that occasion he also repeated an invitation issued by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair for the Pope to visit Britain.
"No doubt they will want to discuss in particular many of the development issues, which is what they have talked about before," said the spokesman.
In a busy week of preparations for the London G20 summit in April Mr Brown had a meeting with the heads of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on Wednesday.
The talks with World Bank president Robert Zoellick and IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn will take place in London.
Next weekend Mr Brown will meet other EU leaders of the G20 in Berlin, followed by another meeting of European heads of government at the end of next week.
Mr Brown's spokesman said: "There are a number of important meetings. We will be setting out further detail of our proposals for the issues that should be discussed and considered at the G20, and the Prime Minister is likely to be doing that later this week."
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(Source: TH)