The first American pope flew into one of the world’s wealthiest postcodes on Saturday and spent the day telling its residents, with considerable papal directness, that wealth exists to be shared.
Pope Leo arrived in Monaco by helicopter from the Vatican — a 90-minute flight to a principality so small that the journey took longer than a walk across the country would. He was the first pope to visit the Mediterranean microstate in nearly five centuries, a fact the Vatican framed as a deliberate statement: even the smallest places, it said, can make an outsized mark on the world. Whether Monaco’s mark has historically run toward the kind of generosity Leo was urging is a question the principality’s per-capita billionaire count answers in its own way.
The 2.08 square kilometre enclave clinging to the French Riviera is the second smallest country on earth, after the Vatican itself. It has no income tax, more registered yachts than most small nations have roads, and the highest concentration of billionaires anywhere in the world. It is also, along with a diminishing handful of other states, a country where Catholicism remains the official religion. Leo arrived into that particular combination of sacred and opulent as a man who clearly had something to say about it.
“Every good placed in our hands bears an intrinsic need not to be held back, but to be shared, so that everyone’s life may be better,” he told crowds waving yellow Vatican flags in brilliant Mediterranean sunshine. “In God’s eyes, nothing is received in vain.”
His first meeting was with Prince Albert, Monaco’s head of state and the son of the late Grace Kelly, the Hollywood actress who became a princess by marriage and remained a figure of global fascination long after her death. Leo gave Albert a gift chosen with the kind of pointed symbolism the Vatican occasionally deploys when it wants to make a point without making a speech: a colourful mosaic from the Vatican’s studio depicting St Francis of Assisi, the 13th-century son of a wealthy merchant who gave away his inheritance to serve the poor. Albert received it with the composure of a man accustomed to receiving things.
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In his address at the prince’s official residence, Leo made the subtext explicit. He urged Monaco’s citizens to “put your prosperity at the service of law and justice” — language that, in a country where prosperity is the defining characteristic and justice a somewhat more variable quantity, carried specific weight. The pope was not speaking in generalities. He was speaking to people who have, in abundance, the thing he was asking them to share.
The crowds that gathered were thinner than a papal visit typically attracts. Few people lined the streets as Leo toured the principality in an open-air popemobile — a contrast with the tens of thousands who turn out in Rome or the millions who greet popes in places like the Philippines or Brazil. Monaco has a resident population of around 40,000, which sets an upper limit on turnout, but even accounting for that, the streets were not full. A place where people have arrived specifically to be left alone does not necessarily reorganise itself around a visiting religious leader, however historic the occasion.
Among those who did come was Jean Claude Haddad, a 60-year-old Monaco resident who said he hoped the pope might use his moral authority to help calm a world unsettled by the Iran war, now entering its fifth week. “At the moment there is a lot of tension,” Haddad said. “He could reunite people. He brings people together.” It was a sentiment that cut past the wealth question entirely and reached for something the crowd, whatever its size, seemed to hold genuinely.
In a meeting with local Catholics, Leo appeared to endorse Prince Albert’s decision last year to veto a Monaco bill that would have legalised abortion — a move that was largely symbolic given that abortion is a constitutional right in France, which surrounds Monaco on three sides, but which the Church welcomed as a matter of principle. Leo urged the gathered faithful to continue speaking up “in defence of the human person,” the formulation the Church consistently uses in discussions of abortion and the death penalty.
Leo was elected in May to lead the 1.4 billion-member Catholic Church, succeeding the late Pope Francis. He is the first American ever to hold the office — a fact that attracted considerable global attention at his election and continues to define how his papacy is read from the outside. Saturday’s Monaco visit was only his second trip outside Italy since taking the throne of St Peter, but the Vatican has signalled that a demanding travel schedule lies ahead this year.
He was back in Rome by evening, having spent a day in a tax haven delivering a homily on generosity.