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At no point in recent Catholic Church history has a pope and a U.S. president seemed to be in such perfect harmony as soon-to-be ex-President Biden and Pope Francis – whose reign seems to be stretching into infinity.

The first U.S. president to visit the Vatican was Woodrow Wilson when he met with Pope Benedict XV in 1919. That meeting started a tradition: it is now almost mandatory that a president visit or host a pope at the White House at least a couple times during their term in office. The vast majority of these visits are apolitical photo ops, with the First Lady in a mantilla, lots of bowing, smiling and gifts being exchanged.

Lyndon Johnson met Pope Paul VI in 1965 in New York and then again in December 1967. Richard Nixon met the same pope in March 1969 and then again in 1970. President Ford followed suit, meeting Paul VI in 1975. President Carter met John Paul II at the White House in 1979, then two more times at the Vatican. Ronald Reagan met the pope (John Paul II) several times but his first meeting in June 1982 was a closed-door session, the first time in history a U.S. president and a pope met alone.

President Kennedy traveled to the Vatican to meet Paul VI days after the latter’s coronation in July 1963 (papal coronations have since been demoted and are referred to as installations.) During the meeting, Kennedy didn’t kiss the pope’s ring because to do so would have aroused suspicions that-as the first Catholic president-he was intent on building an ideological bridge from Washington to the Vatican.

During the 1960 campaign, anti-Catholicism was at a fever pitch; many people believed a Catholic president would take orders from the pope. Political cartoons at the time portrayed Kennedy as Pope John XXIII’s puppet-on-a string.

After Kennedy’s meeting with Paul VI, he was supposed to have remarked to an aide that simply shaking the pope’s hand would get him “a lot of votes in South Carolina.”

But Kennedy’s handshaking nonchalance caused a scandal among devout Catholics. America Magazine-before it became a bastion of radical leftwing theology-declared Kennedy’s actions “disgraceful” because they lacked “appropriate etiquette when greeting a pope.”

Today, old school etiquette like ring kissing is DOA when it comes to pope-president meet ups but that’s only because the last few popes have discouraged it.  It can be said that John F. Kennedy may have started a trend, just as he did during Inauguration Day when he took the oath of office without wearing a hat. Soon after he was sworn in, millions of men threw their hats into trash bins or wrapped them up in mothballs.

Ronald Reagan instituted diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Washington for the first time in 1984. In the gaffs and blunders meet-the-pope department, George Bush wins the trophy. During his visit to the Vatican he repeatedly called Pope Benedict XVI pope “sir.” Not only that but while speaking with the pontiff he slouched in his chair as if preparing to roll a cigarette on his Texas ranch.

President Biden is the 14th president to visit the Vatican, and the second Catholic after Kennedy. The difference between Biden and Kennedy’s pope visit is that the pope today (Francis) is considerably less Catholic than any of his papal predecessors. Francis hates the Traditional Mass; he’s gone on record as saying that traditionalist Catholics seek “to safeguard the ashes of the past”; he seems to take delight in persecuting traditionalist bishops and priests while he promotes clergy who flirt with (or flaunt) heresy.

As a friend of mine said who lived in Buenos Aires when Francis was cardinal-archbishop there, “He’s always hated the Latin Mass; he’s always been a pseudo-socialist; he’s always hated the English language and he has little to zero love for the United States.”

How’s that for a Holy Father?

Biden and Francis in many ways seem to be a match made in Heaven. Meaning, of course, the bridge many feared would be built in the 1960’s from Washington to the Vatican has finally been constructed albeit sixty-five years later. But it is a far different sort of bridge than the one imagined in 1961: it’s a bridge from one swamp to another.

Biden can delude himself into thinking he’s a good Catholic – Francis told him he was a good Catholic, after all – while promoting abortion and gender ideology, while Francis – via telephone chats – gets to tell Biden what to do.

As Vatican News reported:

“Pope Francis and outgoing US president Joe Biden spoke by phone yesterday about various current issues, beginning with peace efforts in view of Christmas. The US leader thanked the Pope for ‘his work to promote human rights and protect religious freedom.’ He then accepted an invitation to visit the Vatican in January. A theme close to the Pope’s heart is the fate of US death row inmates for whom he launched an appeal at the Angelus on 8 December.”

On December 23, 2024, not missing a step, Biden announced he was commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, including a Philadelphia drug lord who was convicted of killing a dozen people. The sentences were converted to life in prison. Philadelphia’s 6 ABC Action News reported:

“One of those inmates is Kaboni Savage, who was convicted of killing 12 people, including four children. The youngest victims died when Savage ordered the firebombing of the house where they lived in an act of retribution against a witness.

“Family members of the children who died are devastated. That includes Tina Fox, who told Action News she is disappointed in the president.

“Many of Fox’s relatives were murdered at Savage’s direction at a home on North 6th Street in 2004.”

On January 6, Pope Francis-as if returning a favor to Biden for his pardoning of 37 murderers on death row-announced he was appointing rabid anti-Trumper Cardinal Robert McElroy to the most import episcopal see in the United States: Washington, D.C.

McElroy, who has been the bishop of San Diego since 2015, will replace liberal Cardinal Wilton Gregory, Archbishop of Washington, D.C. since 2019.

McElroy was a severe critic of Trump’s plan during his first administration to launch a deportation campaign targeting millions of illegal immigrants living in the United States.

Reuters reported that McElroy “called on Americans to disrupt those plans in a 2017 speech and later told a Catholic magazine that Catholics ‘simply can’t stand by and watch [immigrants] get deported.’”

McElroy’s appointment has caused some scandal in the Catholic world, as attorneys for alleged San Diego sex abuse victims claim that McElroy has been “an institutional defender of sex abuse in the Catholic Church.”

But wait… there’s another possible ‘gotcha’ moment here.

Was Donald Trump mildly prescient when he named Brian Burch, a Francis critic who leads the conservative Catholic pro-Trump advocacy group CatholicVote, as ambassador to the Vatican?

Did Francis appoint McElroy in response to Trump’s pick of Burch in addition to rewarding Biden for his 37 pardons? Burch, of course, is really a living example of how it is more than possible to be more Catholic than the pope.

In summation: January 20th cannot come soon enough. The interminable time between the November 5 Election and Inauguration Day has never seemed so long. The two and a half month gap in past presidential elections seemed more like time spent in political limbo than what it has become today with a vindictive Delawarean in the White House who won’t stop attempting to thwart Trump’s first year in office.

In the final countdown of hours before Trump is sworn in, what else will Biden do?

He’s already invoked the 119-year-old Antiquities Act protecting the East and West Coasts from offshore oil and natural drilling in response to the incoming president’s to “drill, baby drill.”

He’s also considering preemptive pardons to Trump’s political enemies prior to the Inauguration. Of course, it is not really Biden who’s engineering these slings and arrows but a cabal of leftists who control ole Joe like many thought Pope John XXIII would control Kennedy.

One good thing to value is the “demolition” of that tiny globalist bridge between the Vatican and Washington once Trump takes power.

It may show the world that even Trump is more Catholic than the pope.