ROME – On Thursday the White House announced that United States President Joe Biden will visit Italy in January, where he will meet with Pope Francis and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to discuss global peace efforts and various international challenges.
In its Dec. 19 statement, the White House said Biden, who will step down Jan. 20, when Donald Trump is inaugurated to his second term in office, will travel to Rome from Jan. 9-12 to meet separately with the pope, Meloni, and Italian President Sergio Mattarella.
Biden’s audience with Pope Francis will be Jan. 10, it said, saying the meeting will be an opportunity to “discuss efforts to advance peace around the world.”
Meetings with Meloni and Mattarella will also “highlight the strength of the U.S.-Italy relationship,” and will be an occasion for Biden to thank Meloni “for her strong leadership of the G7 over the past year and discuss important challenges facing the world.”
The announcement of Biden’s visit came after he and Pope Francis spoke over the phone Thursday, with a separate White House readout saying that the two discussed “efforts to advance peace around the world during the holiday season.”
Biden also thanked the pope “for his continued advocacy to alleviate global suffering, including his work to advance human rights and protect religious freedoms,” the readout said, saying the pope invited Biden to visit the Vatican in January, and Biden accepted.
The last time Pope Francis and Biden, the United States’s second Catholic president, met was in June when they participated in a G7 summit in Bari, Italy.
During that meeting, the White House said Biden and Francis discussed the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
“The leaders emphasized the urgent need for an immediate ceasefire and a hostage deal to get the hostages home and address the critical humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” a White House statement said.
Biden, whose visit comes just days before the end of his term, was present for the start of Pope Francis’s papacy, when in his capacity as vice president he led the United States delegation at Francis’s inaugural Mass.
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