Popes and POTUS
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 20th 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.
