POPES AND POTUS

 

Popes and POTUS

Brad Miner

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

 

Before he leaves office, Joe Biden will not be meeting with Pope Francis as planned. The Los Angeles wildfires put an end to that – or so we’re told. But the original plan got me curious about such meetings and what they mean. It’s a complex but, at least sometimes, significant history.

If you were to do an Internet search, you’d likely read that the first president to visit a pope was Woodrow Wilson in 1919. That’s not true, not even close, unless you add the modifier sitting. Then, yes, Wilson, who was in Europe after World War I for the Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920), was the first “current occupant of the White House” to visit the Apostolic Palace.

A further distinction: some former presidents met with popes (or tried to), and sitting presidents have met with men who would become popes. In this latter category, Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli at the president’s Hyde Park home during the future Pius XII’s 1936 visit to the United States. A similar meeting happened in Rome when George W. Bush met with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger at the funeral of John Paul II.

But before the 20^th century, official meetings with a pope in the U.S. would have been unwelcome had they been possible. No pope had ever crossed the Atlantic until Paul VI’s historic visit to America in 1965. Pope Paul would eventually visit twenty countries and was the first ever to travel outside of Europe. In New York, he met with Lyndon Johnson at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Had Pius XII or John XXIII decided to be the first to visit America, they likely would not have been invited to the White House. Had John F. Kennedy escaped assassination and won a second term, I suspect Paul VI would have been welcomed there. But before the election of our first Catholic president, lingering anti-Catholicism would have prevented it.

But before Wilson’s 1919 audience with Benedict XV, no fewer than four former presidents visited with a pope while in Rome: Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore met separately with Pius IX in 1855. Pio Nono also met with Franklin Pierce in 1857. Ulysses S. Grant met with Leo XIII in 1878, just about a year after the end of Grant’s second term. Was this an early sign that official anti-Catholicism was on the wane? Perhaps.

After leaving the presidency, Theodore Roosevelt wanted to meet with Pius X at the Vatican, and the pope agreed, but with the stipulation that Roosevelt not call upon a Protestant group working to convert Catholics in Rome. Roosevelt wasn’t even aware there was such a group, but he was miffed and refused. (An interesting backstory: In 1869, the Roosevelt family was making the European Grand Tour and had an audience with Pius IX during which the 11-year-old Teddy kissed the pope’s ring!)

Recently deceased president Jimmy Carter has the distinction of being the first president to host a pope at the White House. Every subsequent president has done so – except for Joe Biden, whose presidency did not coincide with Francis’ lone visit to America.

But Biden has had several meetings with Pope Francis at the Vatican. This was also true of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, Obama, and Trump. What was once unthinkable in American politics has become very important, as America’s chief executives have sought the sometimes elusive and often unpredictable Catholic vote.

 

President Reagan with John Paul II at the Vizcaya Museum in Miami, Florida in 1987 [photo via Wikipedia]

 

These Vatican meetings – let’s be frank – are usually little more than photo ops. They are cordial, and ring-kissing is a thing of the past, although Joe Biden has more than once come embarrassingly close to kissing Francis in a most inappropriate manner. But he does that with everybody.

In meetings between Pope Francis and Donald Trump, the usual cordiality fails to disguise an underlying tension that arises from their disagreements about immigration – or, as the papal side of the controversy would have it, migration – as though the millions coming from Africa to Europe and from Latin America to the U.S. are instinctive flocks of birds or butterflies.

President Trump and Pope Francis will likely meet again, and – doubtless – there will be tension in the room

There was never any tension when Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II would meet, as they did four times. There has never been a closer connection between the Vatican and the White House as when those two men put their heads together.

Their first meeting was on June 7, 1982, in the year after they both survived assassination attempts. It’s clear the men bonded over that, but much more drew them close to one another – not least the battle against communism.

John Paul was shot on the feast of Our Lady of Fatima. When the Blessed Virgin spoke to the children in 1917, she warned about what would result from the Russian Revolution. Karol Wojtyla had faced communism’s rise in Poland, just as Reagan had in Hollywood.

Throughout the West, post-war policy had been to contain communism. But this president and this pope had a different plan, which Reagan made public in a speech at Notre Dame just six weeks after he’d been shot: “The West won’t contain communism, it will transcend communism.” It will “dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”

Before being elected to the presidency, Reagan had already been inspired by John Paul’s 1979 visit to Poland. The pope had made what can only be called a frontal assault on communism, and it proved to Reagan that bold confrontation with the Evil Empire was the key to hastening its collapse.

As Paul Kengor has written: “Pope John Paul II had come to remind his fellow Poles and the world that there is a God and they had a right to freely worship that God. Reagan asked: ‘Will the Kremlin ever be the same again? Will any of us for that matter?’”

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/