Popes and America: How pontiffs have been impacting American politics since 1919

On Sept. 22, Pope Francis landed in the United States for his first official visit since assuming the papacy in March 2013 as the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church. Beginning his visit in Washington, D.C., he drew a crowd of 11,000 as he proceeded to the White House for a meeting with President Obama. Francis’ visit to the United States is historic, to say the least. His visit marks only the fourth time a pontiff has visited the United States. With approximately 70 million Americans identifying as Catholic, the pope’s visit made many, as Vice President Joe Biden put it, “excited, quite frankly.”

For millennials, experiencing the inevitable storm of media coverage on the papal visit will be a new experience. With the 2016 presidential campaign underway, and with Francis having brought up several key hot-button issues in his speeches to Congress on Thursday, Sept. 24 and to the United Nations General Assembly the following day, candidates will inevitably use Francis to leverage the messages of their own political campaigns. Already, GOP presidential candidate and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie criticized Francis’ policy on Cuba as “wrong,” adding, “his infallibility is on religious matters, not political ones.” Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont told MSNBC that he believed Francis “has played just an extraordinary and brilliant and courageous role on this planet over the last several years.” It’s not unreasonable to suspect that every 2016 presidential candidate will release a statement on the pope or his visit to the United States at some point before next week.

The idea of American politicians using papal encounters as political tools is not something new to American politics. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson’s meeting with Pope Benedict XV marked the first time an incumbent United States president met with a pope. The meeting, unplanned due to Wilson’s focus on matters of the Paris Peace Conference at the time, proved to occur at a pivotal point in American history, as more and more Catholics in America at the time were turning to Wilson’s Democratic Party.

President John F. Kennedy, the nation’s first and only Catholic president,met Pope Paul VI in Italy in July 1963. Kennedy’s encounter with the pope occurred only a month after the passing of Pope John XXIII, who had died of stomach cancer at the age of 81. The encounter sparked an interesting debate in the media over how Kennedy, secular president of the United States at the time but still a Roman Catholic, would present himself to the pope: kneeling and kissing his papal ring or simply shaking his hand. In the end, luckily for the nervous Kennedy, Paul extended his hand to him first, and Kennedy took that as a cue that the pontiff had made the decision for him.

More recently, Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush have had encounters with popes as well. For Reagan, this happened four times with Pope John Paul II from 1982 through 1987. Reagan used the publicity of the meeting and the Polish pope’s staunch anti-communist sentiments to advance his own anti-communist messages. Some have even suggested that their relationship was intimate to the point at which a “Holy Alliance” conspiracy was being plotted to put an official end to communism. The ramifications of this conspiracy never came to fruition, but many to this day still mistrust the idea of political and religious leaders working together on matters of foreign policy. The most recent papal visit, in 2008, saw Pope Benedict meet with President George W. Bush at the White House. After a 40-minute talk in the Oval office, they issued a joint statement of concern about “the precarious state of Christian communities” in Iraq. Again, many in the media were critical of the seemingly increasingly dynamic relationship between president and pontiff.

Regardless of who papal visits to the United States effect and how, the end conclusion is clear. The head of the Roman Catholic Church claims almost 1.2 billion followers worldwide. With such a large following comes a great political responsibility. Any American politician knows that using the religious and moral influence and authority of a papal visit to the United States has the potential to be a prime way to influence the values and voting behavior of the American people.