And the PM today came back from his trip to Vatican City, Rome, where he went to meet with Pope Francis. He was scheduled to meet the Pope back in December, but had to cut that trip early because of the contention between ASR/BSI and BSCFA.
But with an agreement signed, and relative calm prevailing, Briceno rescheduled his trip. He left Belize on April 17th, and during his visit with the Pope, presented him with a painting by Penn Cayetano.
Today he told us the experience was inexplicable.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"I wish I could find the words to describe meeting the Holy Father, Pope Francis. To me, it's one of the highlights in my life, to meet such a humble and holy man and we had an opportunity to be able to speak on a number of issues. I was fortunate that we had just a one on one and we had an interpreter but we spoke Spanish, he was happy that I could speak in Spanish with him and so we went beyond the time that was allotted to me and spoke about Belize,  asking how is my family, my mother who was a very religious person in the Catholic faith and of course I asked him to pray for Belize, to pray for my family, to pray for all of us and I ended up by extended an invitation to visit Belize and I said by visiting Belize he could, there's a group of people from Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador who will be able to come and see him and he said he would wish to come, hopefully someday he'll be able to come but we shall see. Now when I get back to the office, I do plan to write to thank him and also reminding him about the invitation that I extended him to come to visit Belize."
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