Joe Biden and Pope Francis will meet as part of the G20 Leaders Summit in Italy.
Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty Images
Pope Francis receives Joe Biden, the second Catholic president of the United States, in audience tomorrow and with whom he is joined by issues such as the fight against climate change, but who arrives at the Vatican at a difficult time due to the attacks of the conservative Church in his country against his position in favor of abortion.
The first meeting of a pope with a Catholic American president was on July 2, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was received at the Vatican by Paul VI, who had been elected just a few days earlier, in June 1963.
While the Vatican does not usually advance the issues to be addressed, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said in a statement that they would talk about how to “work together” to “end the covid-19 pandemic, address climate change and caring for the poor ”.
What was expected as a meeting with which relations between the Vatican and the United States would be normalized, after the tensions with the former administration of Donald Trump; However, it has been complicated in recent months by how Biden has faced the migration crisis, the departure from Afghanistan – criticized by the Pope – and the offensive of the conservative Church.
This hearing will occur just two weeks before the fall assembly of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore to discuss controversial document on the Eucharist that some of them want to pass to excommunicate politicians who are in favor of legal abortion, including Biden and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi visited the Vatican a few days ago and met with Francisco in what he defined on his social networks as “a personal and official honor.” and calling the Argentine pope “a source of joy and hope for Catholics and for all people, who encourages each of us to be good stewards of God’s Creation, to act on the climate, to embrace the refugee, the immigrant and the poor, and recognize the dignity and divinity in all ”.
For the moment, Francis and the Vatican have indirectly tried to avoid what would be serious divisions between Catholics. At the beginning of May 2021, a letter from the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Spanish Cardinal Luis Francisco Ladaria, was released to the president of the American bishops, José Gómez, stating that “it would be misleading if one gives the impression that abortion and euthanasia alone are the only serious questions of Catholic moral and social doctrine ”.
While the pope has reiterated forcefully in recent days that abortion for the Church “is a homicide,” he was more blunt when on the flight back from Slovakia he told reporters who asked him about this matter that he would never excommunicate nobody and observed that “sometimes the bishops do not behave like shepherds, but are inclined to politics.”
Biden arrives in Rome to attend the G20 summit, to be held from October 30 to 31 He will also hold a meeting on Friday with the head of the Italian Government, Mario Draghi, and then travel to Glasgow (United Kingdom), from November 1 to 2, for the COP26 climate change summit.
With information from Efe.
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Source-laopinion.com