With Gift and in Conversation, Vatican Presses Trump on Climate Change -<br />By MARK LANDLER and JASON HOROWITZMAY 24, 2017<br />VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis put climate change on the agenda of his first meeting with President Trump on Wednesday,<br />and the subject is likely to come up again and again in the president’s encounters with other world leaders in the coming days.<br />The pope presented the president with a copy of his influential encyclical on preserving the environment, while in a broader meeting, Cardinal<br />Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, urged Mr. Trump not to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord.<br />Francis replied, “It is with all hope that you may become an olive tree to make peace.”<br />As he bade the pope farewell, Mr. Trump told him, “I won’t forget what you said.”<br />For Mr. Trump, who came here after stops in Saudi Arabia<br />and Israel, the visit to the Vatican capped a tour of the ancestral homes of three of the world’s great monotheistic religions.<br />After posing for a picture — “protocol,” the pope murmured — Mr. Trump took a seat across a wooden desk from Francis.<br />“We had a good exchange on the difficulty of balancing addressing climate change, and ensuring<br />that you still have a thriving economy and you can still offer people jobs so they can feed their families.”<br />In their first encounter, the pope and the president, two men with starkly different worldviews, sought to<br />bridge the chasm between them with a handshake, a private audience and a mutual pledge to work for peace.
