I am grateful the dust seems to have wafted back to Earth after the much-publicized war of words between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV. Still, the headlines were a reminder that the relationship between Rome and Washington, D.C., has not always been an easy one.
What I have learned in my research is the connection between presidents and popes goes back further than I knew. Presidents Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, and Ulysses S. Grant had met popes as former presidents doing European tours.
The first sitting U.S. president to meet face-to-face with a pope was Woodrow Wilson, who met with Pope Benedict XV in 1919, in the aftermath of the cataclysmic “Great War.” It would be 40 more years before another president, Dwight Eisenhower, met St. Pope John XXIII in Vatican City. Even then, the U.S. had not yet formally recognized the Vatican, but Eisenhower’s visit began an unbroken tradition of every U.S. president meeting the Roman Pontiff either in Rome or on U.S. soil.
And with every meeting, a weird balance of statecraft and religion is achieved with the help of protocols and formalities. One of them, the traditional exchange of mementos, has remained constant, regardless of how syncopated or disjointed Vatican/America relations may be. When heads of state make any official visit to a foreign land, they usually bring something grown or made back home, and their host usually reciprocates in kind. Those gifts then find themselves either in the Vatican Archives or some Presidential Library inventory, where they sit mostly unnoticed.
Some of the gifts exchanged were elegant. When John F. Kennedy visited Rome in July of 1963, he presented a beautiful desk set with both presidential and papal seals engraved on it. At the time, Kennedy had to delicately navigate his novel status as the first Catholic president in a country where anti-Catholicism, though much diminished, was still an active agent in the political lifeblood of America. He could give the pope a gift, but President Kennedy could not recognize the Vatican in any official capacity without serious political repercussions. It would take a Protestant, Ronald Reagan, to do that nearly 20 years later. Even then, the move did not come without some political fallout.
When St. Pope Paul VI came to New York in 1965, it was a special time for American Catholics. He was the first pope to visit the “New World” while holding the Petrine Office. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a man whose every fiber of being had a political agenda attached to it, sought out Paul while he was in New York and — you guessed it, they exchanged gifts. LBJ and Paul met on other occasions as well, and yes, they exchanged more gifts. And if a gift tells us anything about the giver, in one of these exchanges, Paul gave Johnson a medieval work of art.
The President of the United States gave the pope a bronze bust of himself.
Besides being a symbol of friendship, gifts are often useful tools to show penitence, or they can be helpful for mending bruised friendships. Like LBJ, our current president may be tempted to send the pope a golden bust of himself. So far, he has resisted that urge.
Instead, he recently sent the Secretary of State to the Vatican. Whether it was to send a peace offering or not, sending a man like Marco Rubio, who, by his own public statements, has rediscovered his Catholic faith, was a good start toward starting over in a relationship that is unprecedented in its volatility — at least from this side of the Atlantic.
For that visit, Secretary Rubio’s gift was a simple crystal football. It looked like a paperweight, and it was refreshing to see a gesture that did not seem to have any overt political agenda attached to it. The pope graciously accepted it, even uttering a modest “wow” upon seeing it.
Then it was the pope’s turn, and he presented the Secretary of State with a pen made of olive wood. The message could not have been clearer, even though presented in the gentle but firm style that seems to be an integral part of Leo’s style. Made from the wood that comes from the tree that has long been associated with peace, let us hope Leo has given the gift that truly does keep on giving.
