“It’s Good to Be Back”: The President, The Pope, and the Future of Faith

What President Biden’s Meeting with Pope Francis Tells Us About Where Religion Is Headed

Bruce Feiler

Today

Last Thursday, I received a text from CNN inviting me to come on the air the next day to discuss the significance of President Biden’s audience with Pope Francis. I immersed myself in the history of such trips, revisited the week I spent traveling with the network in 2015 to cover Pope Francis’s landmark trip to the United States, and dug into Catholic voting patterns. I was ready. Then CNN emailed on Friday to say that their plans had changed. The life of a sometime-TV pundit! No problem, I thought. I have a newsletter now! So in today's special Nonlinear Life, here’s what you might have missed anyway.

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In January 1919, Woodrow Wilson became the first American president to set foot in Vatican City when he visited Pope Benedict XV. Wilson was greeted by a platoon of Swiss Guards and a band of gendarmes, who played the American national anthem. The president’s private audience with the pope lasted 20 minutes, during which time the pontiff quizzed the devout southern Presbyterian president (the son of a preacher, Wilson read the Bible every day) about conditions in the different countries he had visited.

Woodrow Wilson arriving in Vatican City for a meeting with the Holy See

Almost exactly a century later, another devout American president—this time, only the second Catholic to hold the office—visited the Vatican on Friday amidst a showdown between the most prominent Catholic in the country and the leaders of the American Church. In this case, the big winner was Joe Biden, the former Catholic schoolboy who once dreamed of becoming a priest until his mother told him he couldn’t go into the seminary until he had some experience dating girls.

The meeting was also a stark reminder to people of all religions that in the battle between doctrine and acceptance, the momentum is on the side of being open-minded, not hard-headed.

To me, there are three takeaways from the historic visit: the first is personal; the second is political; the third is about the future of faith.

Let’s start with the personal

I was live on CNN in September 2015, covering Pope Francis’s gigantic mass in front of hundreds of thousands of worshipers stretched out before the famed Rocky steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Unseen by the cameras, Pope Francis held a private meeting with Vice President Biden and his family soon after that mass. The pontiff offered condolences to the Bidens on the loss of their son Beau just three months earlier.

Here's what NBC News reported about that meeting:

According to a person close to the president, what struck Biden most about the conversation was how Francis talked about his son “in specific detail,” rather than talking generally about loss as other dignitaries had done in the preceding months. Francis also offered rosaries and other tokens to each family member as he departed, ending with a gesture of sincerity and kindness that moved the entire family, the person said.

“I wish every grieving parent, brother or sister, mother or father would have had the benefit of his words, his prayers, his presence,” Biden recalled.

That personal connection paid off enormously during the president’s visit last week to the Vatican. Coming off a brutal few months of his young presidency, Biden was clearly enjoying his visit and the opportunity to laugh and joke with the pope, whom he had met previously on multiple occasions. The politician who revels in his middle-class roots has a clear rapport with the onetime parish priest who stresses his connection to the barrios of Argentina and the poor around the world.

While Wilson’s private visit with the pope lasted 20 minutes, Obama’s was 50 minutes, and Trump’s was 30 minutes, Biden spent 90 minutes with Francis. No wonder the president said, “It’s good to be back.”

Now, the political.

The electoral backdrop to this meeting is enormous: Catholics are the largest bloc of swing voters in American politics.

The single biggest cohort of voters in the United States is evangelical Christians, who Gallup has found represent about a third of the country. This group is deeply red these days. The second biggest cohort is what religious scholars call nones, everyone from atheists to agnostics to the “I’m not religious I’m spiritual.” This group, which represents about a quarter of the country, is deeply blue.

Pope Francis greets then Vice President Joe Biden in 2015 prior to a joint meeting of congress

The third-largest group is Catholics, which Pew has found represent about 20% of the country. The big difference: They swing politically. According to Gallup, Trump won them by four points in 2016; Biden won them by five points in 2020. That's a swing of nine percentage points. The Biden folks have said that this swing was enough to put the Catholic nominee over the top in the critical states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

What’s more, the demographics of the American Catholic Church are becoming even more politically critical. Today, the Church is 40% Hispanic, and most of the growth is in the southwest, including the new battleground states of Nevada, Arizona, and possibly even Texas. Presidential elections for years to come will continue to be centered on Catholic voters.

That brings us to the real headline of the Biden-Francis summit: The triumph of the personal over the political

The real news of the meeting between the president and the pope was that it focused on the matter of communion. In recent months, U.S. bishops had threatened to withhold the sacrament of holy communion from the president over his support of abortion rights. Never mind that Pew has found 55% of Catholics say abortion should be legal. American bishops are largely holdovers from the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, two leaders who were theologically much more conservative than Francis has been.

After their meeting on Friday, the president reported that the pope told him he could continue to receive communion. As the New York Times elaborated, one Vatican historian, Alberto Melloni, called the gesture “A very strong choice,” adding “the pope wanted people to know, and he wanted the American bishops not to take that path” toward denying Catholic politicians communion.

And the truth is: It’s not really a fair fight between the pope and the bishops. According to Pew, Francis has an 82% popularity among U.S. Catholics and a 63% popularity among the American public at large.

This faux fight has an even larger message to anyone who cares about religion. There’s an age-old battle within religion between strict observance of the law and a more compassionate view toward people who struggle, doubt, and hold some opinions that do not agree with orthodoxy. This tension is not a simple question; you can’t erase every tenet of a religion and still have a religion. But the more religious leaders come down on the side of inflexibility, the more they’re going to find their pews empty and their flocks diminished.

Young Joe Biden and his brother Jim celebrate their sister Valerie's first communion

The lesson of the two Catholic schoolboys in their 70s and 80s who now serve at the peaks of their professions is that anyone who professes faith and attempts to put their beliefs into daily service should be welcomed into the fold, regardless of whether some of their beliefs may not align with what is currently considered doctrine. It’s a lesson that all faiths could learn from. If so, they might find a lot more people who are willing to say, “It’s good to be back.”

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