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On board the Air Force One in January, Joe Biden had to wonder if the cosmos conspired against him. With only a few days in office, Biden had hoped to make a personal wish: a last presidential meeting with Pope Francis.
But factors independent of his will made a last pilgrimage to the Vatican increasingly unlikely.
Biden, who considered the priesthood as a younger man and prides himself on his Catholicism, met three popes during his half-century in politics, starting with Pope John Paul II in 1980. But it is Pope Francis with whom he probably forged the deepest link. After the death of Beau Biden in 2015, Pope Francis advised the Biden clan working in their very public sorrow on the family’s golden child. More than six days that summer during the Pope’s tour in the United States, Biden was often the length of an arm. A year later, Biden was again with the Pope, speaking at a Vatican cancer conference. In the oval office, a photo of Francis was mixed with those of family members on the Biden desk. They talked by phone from time to time, just to check in a friendly voice.
While Biden returned from a California besieged by a series of rapidly growing forest fires, he composed an in progress meeting with aid nestled around a conference table in the west wing. The trip to West was also outside the scale as any presidential trip, with detours and delays distressing their plans. Now, they discussed his next three -day trip to Europe, which was to include time to surprise Francis with the presidential medal of freedom, the highest civil distinction in the country. But the crisis situation on the west coast had now rendered the concept of Biden leaving the country politically untenable. When he returned to the White House that evening, he told the aid to remove the planned trip, which was to start the next day. Biden personally called Pope Francis to explain the situation and inform him that he would receive an unexpected honor by the Vatican diplomatic representatives in Washington. It was this last conversation, on January 11, which stung the particularly hard president, according to two people involved in this decision.
The Pope is now back on the agenda of Biden, but in a very different way. The chief of the 1.4 billion Catholics in the world died on Monday, less than a month after a long stay in hospital for pneumonia. Biden – Only the second Catholic to serve as president and who still celebrates mass of most weekends – will probably want to attend Francis funeral. The policy of this could become delicate, because it is not at all clear if the current president has an interest in paying tribute to a spiritual leader with whom he clashed several times.
The funeral of a Pope – in particular the first of the Americas, not to mention the first Jesuit – tries to be one of these events which dominates the diplomatic calendar. Its meaning is up there with the death of icons like Nelson Mandela or a British monarch. It is a moment that requires delicacy, and it is not exactly a set of skills radiating from those in power in the official Washington.
At the start of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, Trump seemed to enjoy fighting with Francis – who was about to visit the United States with Biden as his de facto CHAPERONE – SOUGGER The pontiff was low and offered an opening to the Islamic State to take over the Vatican. During the South Carolina primary in 2016, Trump and the Pope entered a full skirmish, Francis wondering if Trump was even a Christian and the real estate magnate suggesting that the pontiff was a tool of the Mexican government. (Trump’s collaborators finally convinced him that the fight was not a clear gain when he was trying to convince the voters of the faith to try his luck on the billionaire three times.)
The Rift continued during Trump’s first term, although the pair meeting during Trump’s first trip to the office is quite pleasantly. Pope Francis, born in Buenos Aires of an Italian family fleeing fascism in the era of Mussolini, had little consideration for the hard immigration views of Trump and never shouted by criticizing his plans for a wall on the American-Mexican border. “The wall manufacturers betray each other,” said Pope Francis during a visit to Panama. On a return flight from another trip, he told journalists that border walls were not the answer: “Those who build walls will become prisoners of the walls they have set up.”
Enmity has not faded. Earlier this year, Trump’s best executor on border issues Tom Homan suggested that the Pope was a hypocrite. “They have a wall around the Vatican. If you illegally enter the Vatican, the crime is serious. You will be accused of a serious and imprisoned crime,” said Homan.
Trump’s candidate to be his Vatican ambassador, Brian Burch, was a partisan papal and vocal critic, making it an annoying adjustment if he is confirmed as planned.
On another chronology, the White House could have better used the vice-president JD Vance, who was baptized as Catholic in 2019, to smooth things with one of the best religious leaders in the world. But the aggressive Cheerleading of Vance of Trump policies has complicated this approach, so much so that Pope Francis has dressed the American bishops in a letter in February so as not to do more to oppose the defense by Vance of the expulsion program for theological reasons. The skirmish continued, Cardinal Timothy Dolan denounced the suggestions of Vance according to which financial incentives were at the origin of the defense of the Catholic bishops of migrants as “bad”. Sunday, the day before Francis’ death, Vance exchanged Easter greetings with a sick pope. According to the Associated Press, the Vance motorcycle was on the Vatican territory for only 17 minutes.
Contrast everything This in Biden, who met three times with Francis while Biden spent eight years as vice-president and twice when he became president. During a visit in 2021, the pair spent 90 amazing minutes together while the aid of the two delegations did not stop looking at each other, as if to ask which side wanted to interrupt the bosses. Those who are close to Biden say his humility towards François is authentic, Biden often reminding his priests to priests here in the United States that the pope himself called him as “good Catholic”. The last trip to the Vatican was designed as a reward for the two men, who recognize that they are often broken down with those around them and too often counted.
Biden’s advisers say that the boss and the Pope sometimes exchanged telephone calls, often with informal intestinal checks and spiritual checks. During a December call, the Pope put pressure on Biden to soften the penalties of the Rown for the convicts. Biden finally commissioned the sentences of 37 of the 40 people in the corridor of Federal Death, altering Trump’s plans to resume the executions once in office.
There was no immediate detail on Trump’s plans around the funeral. (Francis revised his funeral plans last year to be buried in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, not in the caves under the Saint-Pierre basilica where most of the popes find their last place of rest.)
State affairs like a papal funeral generally bring together political rivals at war. When Mandela died in 2013, the president of the time, Barack Obama, invited former president George W. Bush to join him during a swirling trip to South Africa where they were on the ground for only 13 hours. Even if Obama spent a large part of his 2008 presidential campaign to avoid Bush, the two men were professional enough to bury the ax; Bush even showed some of her post-Blanc house paintings from her iPad, and Laura Bush, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton have all made pleasant conversations in the Air Force One conference room.
Trump is not Obama, to say it slightly. Trump’s grievance capacity knows no limits, throwing uncertainty as to whether it is ready to travel to attend the funeral of Francis. The prospect of seeing Biden’s possible effort to attend a positive day seems improbable.
Thus, in an unexpected way, the Pope Francis one last time is to hold a mirror in this world and to force us to take a look at two very different presidents which represent very different approaches of work. In the holder, there is a figure that has little respect for anyone who dares to question his infallibility. In the first, there is a badly formulated soul that considered the Pope as the ultimate advisor to a president who wanted advice on what good things looked like in practice. In these two benches, the American civic religion shows itself, with Biden and Trump seated clearly on different sides of the chapel.
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