Friday, 29 October 2021 (YJC)_ President Joe Biden and Pope Francis renewed their close relationship on Friday.
President Joe Biden and Pope Francis renewed their close relationship on Friday, holding a 90-minute meeting that was twice as long as the one the President held with Pope John Paul II in one of his first meetings with a pontiff.
The engagement between the two "was very warm when the delegation arrived in the room," an official said. "There was laughter and clear rapport between President Biden and the Pope."
It was the first time Biden visited the Vatican since 2016, when he was still reeling from the loss of his son Beau to cancer a year earlier.
The reason for that visit was the Third International Regenerative Medicine Conference, and -- in a speech delivered with a massive bronze sculpture of the Resurrection as his backdrop -- Biden made an impassioned call for developing new cures for the disease that took his son's life.
But he also recalled a moment of kindness from his host, Pope Francis, who visited the United States in the months following Beau's death and gathered with Biden's extended family as he departed the states from the Philadelphia International Airport.
"We had just lost my son," Biden said at the start of his speech. "And he met with my extended family in the hangar behind where the aircraft was. And I wish every grieving parent, brother, sister, mother, father, would have the benefit of his words, his prayers, his presence. He provided us with more comfort that even he, I think, will understand."
Biden, alongside first lady Jill Biden, returned to the Vatican on Friday to meet a Pope who has provided both familial comfort and ideological inspiration to a President whose faith has long underpinned his public and private lives.
The President's vehicle pulled to a stop in an interior courtyard of the Vatican at noon local time, and both stepped out from their limo, which was bearing the flag of the Holy See.
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