Pope Francis addresses a joint session of Congress on Sept. 24, 2014, in Washington, DC. (Photo: AFP)
Ahead of US President Joe Biden’s Oct. 29 meeting with Pope Francis, panelists in a webinar offered mostly praise for Biden’s sincerity and what they said is his commitment to his Catholic faith.
“We believe President Biden treats his vocation as a sacred one,” said Mary J. Novak, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice lobby organization.
Biden and the pope both “lead with a very clear conviction that solidarity is essential to our faith,” she said during the Oct. 26 event.
In announcing the webinar, a Network news release called the meeting of the two leaders “an important inflection point for global and US politics.”
The White House has indicated that discussion topics for Biden and the pope in their private meeting at the Vatican are likely to include climate change, income inequality and migration.
Webinar participants highlighted these same issues as those they hoped the two leaders would discuss.
Whether the issue of abortion will come up is not known; Biden as a Catholic supports legal abortion, while church teaching upholds the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death.
One prominent US pro-life leader, Judie Brown of the American Life League, said in an Oct. 28 statement that Pope Francis “needs to hold Biden accountable” for “his pro-abortion views.”
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