Pope Francis will travel to Asti in northern Italy to celebrate his cousin's 90th birthday.
The Vatican press office announced that the Pope will have a private visit with relatives, and the next day will celebrate Mass in the diocese which his parents belonged to before migrating to Argentina in 1929.
It's not the first time he will visit his Italian relatives since becoming pope. In 2015, he celebrated Mass with family members when he visited the city of Turin, where his paternal grandfather was born in 1907, and who Pope Francis credits for instilling in him a hate for war.
POPE FRANCIS
My hate, my anger towards war, I learned from my grandfather who fought on the Piave River in 1914. He transmitted this anger towards war, because he told me about the sufferings of war, and you can't learn this in books. You learn it like that, conveying it from grandparents to grandchildren, and this is irreplaceable.
According to the group of Jesuits that hosted him, the Pope would visit his family each time he came to Italy as a cardinal.
JM
