Biden Shared Grief With Pope Francis. Trump Harbored Grievances Toward Him

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Aboard Air Force One back in January, Joe Biden must have wondered if the cosmos was conspiring against him. With just a few days left in office, Biden had hoped to fulfill a personal wish: one last presidential meeting with Pope Francis. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

But factors beyond his control were making one final pilgrimage to the Vatican look 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 was Pope Francis with whom he has likely forged the deepest connection. After Beau Biden died in 2015, Pope Francis counseled the Biden clan working through their very public grief about the golden child of the family. Over six days that summer during the Pope’s tour of the United States, Biden was often just an arm’s length away. A year later, Biden was again with the Pope, speaking at a cancer conference at the Vatican. In the Oval Office, a photo of Francis was mixed in with those of family members on Biden’s desk. They spoke by phone from time to time, just to check in with a friendly voice.

As Biden flew back from a California besieged by a fast-growing series of wildfires, he dialed into a meeting underway with aides huddled around a conference table back in the West Wing. The trip out West went about as off-schedule as any presidential trip could, with detours and delays plaguing their plans. Now, they were discussing his upcoming three-day trip to Europe, which was set to include time for Biden to surprise Francis with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. But the crisis situation on the West Coast had now made the notion of Biden leaving the country politically untenable. When he returned to the White House that evening, he told aides to scrap the planned trip, which was due to start the next day. Biden personally called Pope Francis to explain the situation and inform him that he would be receiving an unexpected honor by way of the Vatican’s diplomatic reps in Washington. It was that last conversation, on Jan. 11, that stung the President particularly hard, according to two people who were involved in that decision.

The Pope is now back on Biden’s agenda, but in a very different way. The leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics died Monday, less than a month after a lengthy hospital stay for pneumonia. Biden—only the second Catholic to serve as President and one who still celebrates Mass most weekends—will likely want to attend Francis’ funeral. The politics of that might get tricky, as it’s not at all clear whether the current President has any interest in paying respects to a spiritual leader with whom he repeatedly clashed.

The funeral of a Pope—especially the first from the Americas, not to mention the first Jesuit—tends to be one of those events that dominates the diplomatic calendar. Its significance is up there with the deaths of icons like Nelson Mandela or a British monarch. It’s a moment that demands delicacy, and that is not exactly a skillset radiating from those in power in Official Washington.

In the early days of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, Trump seemed to relish picking a fight with Francis—who was on his way to visit the United States with Biden as his de facto chaperone—suggesting the pontiff was weak and was offering an opening for ISIS to take over the Vatican. During the 2016 South Carolina primary, Trump and the Pope got into a full-blown skirmish from afar, with Francis questioning if Trump was even Christian and the real estate tycoon suggesting the pontiff was a tool of the Mexican government. (Trump’s aides eventually convinced him the fight was not a net gain as he tried to convince voters of faith to take a chance on the thrice-married billionaire.)

The rift continued through Trump’s first term, although the pair’s meeting during Trump’s first foreign trip in office went pleasantly enough. Pope Francis, born in Buenos Aires to an Italian family fleeing fascism in Mussolini’s era, had little regard to Trump’s hard-line immigration views and never shied from criticizing his plans for a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. “Builders of walls sow fear,” Pope Francis said during a visit to Panama. On a flight back from another trip, he told reporters that border walls were not the answer: “Those who build walls will become prisoners of the walls they put up.”

The enmity did not fade. Earlier this year, Trump’s top enforcer on border issues, Tom Homan, suggested the Pope was a hypocrite. “They have a wall around the Vatican. If you illegally enter the Vatican, the crime is serious. You’ll be charged with a serious crime and jailed,” Homan said.

Trump’s nominee to be his Ambassador to the Vatican, Brian Burch, has been a partisan operative and vocal papal critic, making it an awkward fit if he is confirmed as expected.

On another timeline, the White House might have made better use of Vice President J.D. Vance, who was baptized as a Catholic in 2019, to smooth things over with one of the world’s top religious leaders. But Vance’s aggressive cheerleading of Trump’s policies complicated that approach, so much so that Pope Francis dressed-down U.S. Bishops in a letter in February for not doing more to object to Vance’s defense of the deportation program on theological grounds. The skirmish continued, with Cardinal Timothy Dolan denouncing Vance’s suggestions that financial incentives were behind Catholic bishops’ defense of migrants as “nasty.” On Sunday, the day before Francis’ passing, Vance exchanged Easter greetings with an ailing Pope. Vance’s motorcade, according to the Associated Press, was on Vatican territory for just 17 minutes.

Contrast all that to Biden, who met three times with Francis while Biden spent eight years as Vice President and twice when he became President. During a 2021 visit, the pair spent an astonishing 90 minutes together as aides from both delegations kept looking at each other, as if to ask which side wanted to interrupt the bosses. Those close to Biden say his humility toward Francis is genuine, with Biden often reminding his priest pals here in the United States that the Pope himself referred to him as a “good Catholic.” The last trip to the Vatican was meant as a reward for both men, who recognize they are often out-of-step with those around them and too often counted out.

Biden advisers say the boss and the Pope would occasionally trade phone calls, often with informal gut-checks and spiritual check-ins. In a December call, the Pope lobbied Biden to soften death-row sentences for convicts. Biden ultimately commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, tampering Trump’s plans to resume executions once back in office.

There were no immediate details about Trump’s plans around the funeral. (Francis revised his funeral plans last year to be buried in Santa Maria Maggiore basilica, not in the grottoes beneath St. Peter’s Basilica where most Popes find their final resting place.)

State affairs like a papal funeral typically bring even warring political rivals together. When Mandela passed away in 2013, then-President Barack Obama invited former President George W. Bush to join him on a whirlwind trip to South Africa where they were on the ground for just 13 hours. Even though Obama spent much of his 2008 presidential campaign eviscerating Bush, the two men were professional enough to bury the hatchet; Bush even showed off some of his post-White House paintings from his iPad, and Laura Bush, Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton all made pleasant conversations in the Air Force One conference room.

Trump is no Obama, to put it mildly. Trump’s capacity for grievance knows no limit, throwing uncertainty over whether he is willing to travel to attend Francis’ funeral. The prospect of him viewing Biden’s possible effort to attend in a positive light seems improbable.

So, in an unexpected way, Pope Francis one last time is holding a mirror up to this world and forcing us to take a look at two very different Presidents who represent vastly different approaches to the job. In the incumbent, there is a figure who has little regard for anyone who dares question his infallibility. In the former, there lies a sorrowed soul who thought of the Pope as the ultimate counselor to a President who wanted advice on what doing the right thing looked like in practice. In those two pews, America’s civic religion shows itself, with Biden and Trump clearly sitting on different sides of the chapel.

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