President Seguro Meets Pope Leo XIV on Thursday and Will Inaugurate a Siza Vieira Sculpture in the Vatican Gardens
The audience is set for 08:00 Lisbon time. The trip also takes in the Portuguese church in Rome and the Holy See's foreign minister, with an invitation for a papal visit to Fátima in 2027 on the table.
President António José Seguro flies to Rome on Wednesday for an official visit to the Vatican, where he will be received by Pope Leo XIV on Thursday morning. The audience is set for 09:00 in Rome, 08:00 in Lisbon, and the programme around it combines diplomacy, the Portuguese national church in the city and a new work by the architect Álvaro Siza Vieira.
The programme
Shortly after landing on Wednesday afternoon, the President will visit the Igreja de Santo António dos Portugueses, the historic Portuguese church in Rome that has long received pilgrims from Portugal. On Thursday, after the papal audience, he will meet Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Holy See's Secretary for Relations with States and International Organisations, effectively its foreign minister, and visit the Sistine Chapel and St Peter's Basilica.
He will then inaugurate Encontro ("Encounter"), a sculpture by Siza Vieira installed in the Vatican Gardens. Siza, who won the Pritzker Prize in 1992, is known above all for his buildings, which makes a sculpture of his in the Pope's own gardens an unusual addition. Seguro is due back in Portugal on Thursday afternoon.
An invitation for 2027
The subtext of the trip is an invitation already on the table. In May, Seguro formally invited the Pope to visit Portugal in 2027, a year that brings together three anniversaries: the 110th anniversary of the apparitions at Fátima, the tenth anniversary of the canonisation of the shepherd children Francisco and Jacinta Marto, and five hundred years since the formalisation of the apostolic nunciature in Portugal.
In the note announcing that invitation, the Presidency described relations between Portugal and the Holy See as "an example of institutional dialogue, mutual respect and historic cooperation between sovereign states", and said a papal visit would "without doubt" be an opportunity to deepen them. Thursday's audience puts the question in front of the Pope in person.
The idea predates Seguro. His predecessor, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, was received by Leo XIV at the beginning of February, shortly before leaving office, and a possible 2027 visit was already discussed then. "It is 110 years of Fátima, and so there is a good reason to include Fátima, and therefore Portugal, in the programme of visits," Marcelo said at the time.
A ninth trip abroad
This will be Seguro's ninth trip abroad since he took office on 9 March. In just over six months he has been to Spain twice, Italy twice, Luxembourg, the United States, France and Cabo Verde, which he chose for his first state visit. The sequence is a departure from his predecessor's, who chose the Vatican as his first destination abroad in each of his mandates, followed by Spain, justifying the order by the Holy See's recognition of Portugal as an independent kingdom in 1179.
The Pope's words on international affairs have found a receptive audience in Belém. Asked in May about the start of the pontificate, Seguro said Leo XIV had spoken consistently "in defence of peace, of dialogue, of the end of suffering", with "the right word at the right moments". It is a register Seguro has tried to adopt at home too: at his six-month mark he had used the veto only once, preferring warnings to confrontation.
