The Pope visits Emma Bonino, former Italian radical leader, convalescing in her own home

“I found it well,” the pontiff assured a journalist from the Italian newspaper ‘La Repubblica’ who recorded him leaving the building. “It was a cordial meeting,” he added.

Emma Bonino has published a photo of the visit on social networks, in which the two are seen in wheelchairs on a terrace in Rome. “It filled me with joy that you told me that I am an example of freedom and resistance,” writes Bonino.

«This morning, with enormous surprise and full of emotion, His Holiness paid me a very pleasant visit. Pope Francis always has his extraordinary human aspect. Even with the gifts he wanted to give me, a wonderful bouquet of roses and chocolates. “I have been impressed by the strength and understanding that he has shown me from his typical Piedmontese greeting ‘cerea’, due to our common origins,” he narrated.

Emma Bonino, 76, was recently hospitalized and admitted to the ICU due to a serious cardiorespiratory crisis. Since last week, he has been following his rehabilitation from home.

The Pope had just presided over the inauguration of the academic year of the Pontifical Gregorian University, and on his way back to the Vatican, he stopped next to the political house, very close to Campo di Fiori square, in the center of Rome. Francisco also met the Argentine journalist Betta Piqué, correspondent for La Nación, on the street, with whom he spoke for a few moments and who pointed out the windows of a building in the area.

On several occasions, Francis has praised Emma Bonino for her defense of migrants and for her demands to improve conditions in Italian prisons. In 2016, in an interview with Corriere della Sera he said that in his opinion Emma Bonino would be among “the greats of Italy today” because “she has offered the best service to Italy to discover Africa”; and that although she “has different opinions from those of the Church”, “we must look at the people, at what they do.”

Diagnosis since 2015

In January 2015, Emma Bonino announced in a radio interview that she had cancer. «I had some routine medical check-ups that revealed a tumor in my left lung. It is a localized and asymptomatic form, which will require a long and complicated chemotherapy treatment, which has already begun and will last at least six months,” he explained. Already then he announced that he was not going to abandon politics, but he was going to moderate his forces.

In those months it emerged that Francisco had called her by phone to inquire about her health. “We had a loving conversation and he encouraged me to be strong,” Bonino explained then. “The Pope also told me that ‘weeds never die.’ “My mother used to tell me that I am a tough weed, but not a bad one,” the politician joked.

Recovered, she explained that she should continue the radiotherapy treatment. Since then, he always appears in public with a headscarf.

Emma Bonino was European Commissioner for Fisheries and Humanitarian Aid between 1995 and 1999. Her popularity soared in Spain during the halibut crisis when the Canadian navy intercepted the Spanish fishing vessel ‘Estai’ in international waters and she accused Canada of “an act of piracy.” ».

When she was 27 years old, in 1975, she organized an “Information Center on sterilization and abortion” and was very active in promoting a referendum on the legalization of abortion in the transalpine country.

The Pope prefers to highlight that years later, he mobilized in the cause of disarmament and the fight against hunger, in the establishment of an International Criminal Court or in peace in Rwanda, that as a European commissioner, he traveled to the Balkans, to Afghanistan , to Somalia, to Iraqi Kurdistan or to Sierra Leone, or that in 1998, along with six other women, she received the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation for her fight for the defense and dignity of women.