MONDAY, OCTOBER 25 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
tional Airport, Biden later said,
Francis asked to meet with
Biden’s f amily, who had lost Beau
a few months earlier. “I wish
every grieving parent, brother,
sister, mother, father, would have
the benefit of his words, his
prayers, his presence,” Biden said
in a speech. “He provided us with
more comfort than even he, I
think, will understand.”
The first U.S. president to meet
with a sitting pope was Woodrow
Wilson in 1919, although the visit,
at the request of a top aide who
was Catholic, did not go well,
according to contemporary ac-
counts. Wilson, the son of a Pres-
byterian minister, initially balked
at receiving a traditional blessing
from Pope Benedict XV, then re-
jected the pontiff’s peace plan.
Perhaps the most closely
watched meeting, however, came
in July 1963, when the first Catho-
lic U.S. president was greeted by
newly elected Pope Paul VI. Ken-
nedy did not kiss the pope’s ring,
instead shaking his hand.
Visits became more regular af-
ter President Ronald Reagan es-
tabl ished diplomatic relations
with the Vatican in 1984 (al-
though two years prior, during a
meeting with Pope John Paul II
after little sleep, Reagan notice-
ably nodded off).
The encounters have at times
been tense, especially if a pontiff’s
humanitarian message collides
with a given president’s agenda.
Pope Benedict XVI, for example,
questioned President George W.
Bush on the Iraq War.
Biden has always made a point
of bringing family members to his
papal visits — his mother in 1995,
his sister Val in 2013, and his son
Hunter in 2016. The pope typical-
ly gives a blessing and a gift, and
Biden this time is expected to
provide a gift to the pope in turn.
“I would counsel to give some-
thing simple and small,” Hackett
said. “The pope just doesn’t go for
the silver sword or the emerald
whatever. That doesn’t go over
with this guy.”
When Biden attended Francis’s
installation as pope in 2013, he
said the pontiff sought to convey a
newly open approach by the Vati-
can.
“When I greeted him, he said,
‘Mr. Vice President, you’re always
welcome here,’ ” Biden recalled
later. “He was really sending a
message to the world, to put out a
welcome sign on the front door of
our church.”
[email protected]Christianity.
The bishops next month will
vote on a proposed document on
the meaning of the Eucharist but,
after a furor, the chair of the
committee that wrote the draft
document has said it will not
mention Biden, abortion or the
role of public figures.
Amendments can be added up
until the last minute, however,
and the floor will be open to
debate among the bishops. Some
may press for at least a mention
that canon law forbids Commu-
nion to people who are “conscious
of serious sin.”
Francis weighed in last month
on the debate over granting Com-
munion to politicians who sup-
port abortion rights, advising
that bishops should be “pastors
and not go condemning.”
“There’s a f undamentally frac-
tured relationship between the
Vatican and the U.S. bishops,”
Faggioli said. “And Joe Biden is in
the middle.”
Dramatic statements about the
church, or the debate about serv-
ing Communion, are unlikely to
emerge from the session, but the
meeting itself will carry a good
deal of symbolism.
“Not many words are needed
when you have such a stage as the
Vatican where the event is the
message,” Faggioli said. “The au-
dience, with the blessing and so
on, will be more than enough as a
message.”
Stylistically, both men pride
themselves on shrugging off the
trappings of power. “Francis him-
self is a kind of middle-class,
regular parish priest. He doesn’t
take himself overly seriously,”
said Ken Hackett, a former U.S.
ambassador to the Vatican who
accompanied Biden to a meeting
with Francis in 2016. Biden, he
said, may be more comfortable
with this pope than with many of
the American bishops.
While many Catholics who
me et the pope kiss his ring, that is
unlikely in Biden’s case, who is
visiting as a head of state and has
himself eschewed that practice.
In his 2007 memoir, Biden re-
called that when he told his moth-
er he was going to meet the queen
of England, she advised him not
to bow despite the protocol.
“When I told her I was going to
see the Pope, it was ‘Don’t you kiss
his ring,’ ” Biden added. “ ‘Re-
member, Joey,’ she’d say , ‘you’re a
Biden. Nobody is better than you.
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holy father is that he’s taking it all
back to what my dad would say:
We have an obligation to fight
against the abuse of power.”
He has restated that affection
for Francis over the years. “We
have a good one now,” Biden said
in 2015, holding up a Washington
Post article that detailed Francis’s
encyclical on the environment.
“I love that guy,” he added in
2016 on MSNBC, responding to
Francis’s criticism of Trump’s im-
migration proposals.
Their relationship deepened
during Francis’s trip to the United
States in 2015, when Biden ac-
companied him at multiple stops
and displayed his usual chatty
manner. “He was just joking all
the time. It was a very comfort-
able thing, casual backslapping
stuff,” Hackett recalled. “He
wasn’t slapping the pope’s back,
but it was like that. Very easygo-
ing.”
As the vice president saw the
pope off at Philadelphia Interna-when he was vice president and
met with Benedict in 2011. He
later told the Jesuit publication
America that they had discussed
Catholic doctrine and whether it
should be imposed on everyone,
particularly when it comes to
issues like abortion.
“It was like going back to theol-
ogy class,” Biden recalled in the
2015 interview. “And by the way,
he wasn’t judgmental. He was
open. I came away enlivened from
the discussion.”
Still, in that same interview, he
expressed far greater enthusiasm
for Francis, saying, “I am so excit-
ed about this pope ... the thing
that I think is so electric about thedesk with an oak cross, and he sat
in a well-used oak chair that
looked like something you might
pick up at the auction in Dover.”
Biden spent 45 minutes with
the pope, who several times
waved away aides when they
knocked on the door to end the
meeting. John Paul, Biden re-
called in an interview with the
Dialog, the diocesan newspaper
in Wilmington, Del., remarked
several times about his youth. “He
kept kidding me about how
young I am,” said Biden, who was
37 at the time.
Biden met John Paul several
more times, but the next exten-
sive sit-down with a pope cameYou’re not better than anybody
else, but nobody is any better
than you.’ ”
Biden did avoid bowing to the
queen on his recent visit to Lon-
don, creating a bit of a stir among
British observers. But when it
comes to kissing the ring, Francis
himself has not always appeared
to enjoy the ritual, creating inter-
national headlines when he at
times withdrew his hand from
worshipers in 2019. (The Vatican
later said it was simply a matter of
not wanting to spread germs.)
Biden’s first papal encounter
came with Pope John Paul II in
1980, when the pontiff invited
him after the senator wrote a
paper examining the likely im-
pact on Poland if the Soviet bloc
were to collapse.
“The Vatican secretary of
state’s of fice was very ornate, but
the Pope’s private library was very
different,” Biden told the News
Journal, a Delaware newspaper,
in 2005. “His desk was a plain oakDEMETRIUS FREEMAN/THE WASHINGTON POST
President Biden, the second Catholic U.S. president, has formed a bond with Pope Francis over the years while facing some pushback from
conservative American bishops due to his stances on gay marriage and abortion rights. The two leaders will meet at the Vatican on Friday.“The meeting is going to be put in terms of this
division in the American church.”
The Rev. G erald P. Fogarty, religious studies professor at University of VirginiaAlexandria VillaseñorCo-Founder, U.S. Youth Climate StrikeAl GoreFormer Vice PresidentAn Inconvenient TruthMonday, October 25 at 11:30 a.m.The former vice president and the teenage activistwill discuss the growing climate crisis, what actionsneed to be taken and what they hope to see comeout of the upcoming United Nations Climate ChangeConference.To register to watch, visit: wapo.st/popnovIN PARTNERSHIP WITH