At least 20 people have been killed and 52 others wounded in a suicide bombing at a church on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria’s health ministry has said.
The attacker entered Mar Elias Church in Dweila during a service and opened fire with a weapon before detonating an explosive vest, according to the interior ministry.
It added that he was affiliated with the jihadist group Islamic State (IS). There was no immediate claim from the group itself.
The Syrian Civil Defence – whose emergency teams are widely known as the White Helmets – posted photos and video from inside the church showing a heavily damaged altar, pews covered in broken glass and a bloodied floor.
One person told AFP news agency outside Mar Elias that “someone entered carrying a weapon” and began shooting. “[People] tried to stop him before he blew himself up,” he added.
A worker at a nearby shop said: “We saw fire in the church and the remains of wooden benches thrown all the way to the entrance.”
Security forces have cordoned off the area around the church and are investigating the attack, according to the interior ministry.
It was the first such attack in Damascus since Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by rebel forces in December.
Interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa – whose Sunni Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is a former al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria – has repeatedly promised to protect religious and ethnic minorities.
However, the country has been rocked by two waves of deadly sectarian violence in recent months.
More than a dozen religious leaders from an array of faiths marched to the steps of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday night, flowers in hand, calling for an end to the federal immigration raids they say have torn families apart and resulted in racial profiling.
At the start of the procession in Plaza Olvera, the Rev. Tanya Lopez, senior pastor at Downey Memorial Christian Church, recounted how last week she watched as plainclothes federal agents swarmed a constituent in the parking lot of her church. Despite her attempts to intervene, she said, the man was detained, and she doesn’t know where he is now.
“All of our faith traditions teach us to love our neighbor, to leave the world with less suffering than when we find it, and this is creating trauma that will be unable to be undone for generations,” Lopez said.
Religious leaders from multiple faiths left flowers on the steps of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles in honor of people detained in recent immigration raids.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Federal enforcement actions have played out across Southern California this week as the Trump administration carries out its vows to do mass deportations of immigrants in the country without documentation. Initially, President Trump focused his rhetoric on those who had committed violent crimes. But shortly after he took office, his administration made clear that it considers anyone in the country without authorization to be a criminal.
The religious leaders marching Wednesday called for a halt to the raids, saying immigrants are integral to the Los Angeles community and deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, regardless of documentation status.
They carried their message through downtown, marching from Plaza Olvera to the Federal Building, dressed in colorful garb reflecting Jewish, Sikh, Muslim and Catholic traditions, and uniting in song and prayer, in Spanish and English.
They called out to God, Creator, the Holy One, and prayed for healing and justice. They prayed for the hundreds of people who have been detained and deported and the families they’ve left behind.
Father Brendan Busse of Dolores Mission Church looks out over the crowd participating in an interfaith protest Wednesday in downtown Los Angeles.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
In the crowd, Talia Guppy held purple flowers to her chest as she sang along. Guppy said she learned that members of her Episcopalian church, St. Stephen’s Hollywood, had been detained during the raid of the Ambiance Apparel factory in downtown L.A. Her church has since moved its services online to accommodate people afraid to venture from their homes.
“We’re out here for them,” she said. “We’re going to keep the hope and keep the faith until we get justice for them.”
At the end of the procession, the marchers approached the steps of the Federal Building. Officers from the Department of Homeland Security poured out of the building and guarded the entrance as clergy leaders lined the steps. Inside, behind semireflective doors, rows of U.S. Marines stood at the ready.
The leaders called for peace and laid flowers on the steps in tribute to those who have been detained.
“We come with flowers, and we will keep coming with flowers as long as our loved ones are held in cages,” said Valarie Kaur, a Sikh leader. She turned her attention to the officers at the doors, who stood stoic, and questioned how they wanted to be remembered by history. Then she placed flowers by their feet.
Sikh leader Valarie Kaur leaves a flower at the feet of federal officers standing guard at the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
In the crowd, protesters held signs with images of the Virgin Mary and Mexican flags. The clergy asked them to be ready to defend their neighbors in the coming days.
Father Brendan Busse, a Jesuit priest at the Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, said he has felt the impact of the raids within his church. Devoted members are no longer in the pews. Others call asking whether it is safe to come to church. The fear is palpable.
“We need to be a safe space for people, not just in our church, but in the whole neighborhood,” he said. “I can’t guarantee to anybody that we are a totally safe space, but to at least give them a sense that in the difficult moment we’re at, that we stand together.”
This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative,funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to addressCalifornia’s economic divide.
That same day, the volunteers and staff of White Pony Express will do what they’ve done for nearly a dozen years, taking perfectly good food that would otherwise be tossed out and using it to feed hungry and needy people living in one of the most comfortable and affluent regions of California.
Since its founding, White Pony has processed and passed along more than 26 million pounds of food — the equivalent of about 22 million meals — thanks to such Bay Area benefactors as Whole Foods, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s. That’s 13,000 tons of food that would have otherwise gone to landfills, rotting and emitting 31,000 tons of CO2 emissions into our overheated atmosphere.
It’s such a righteous thing, you can practically hear the angels sing.
“Our mission is to connect abundance and need,” said Eve Birge, White Pony’s chief executive officer, who said the nonprofit’s guiding principle is the notion “we are one human family and when one of us moves up, we all move up.”
That mission has become more difficult of late as the Trump administration takes a scythe to the nation’s social safety net.
White Pony receives most of its support from corporations, foundations, community organizations and individual donors. But a sizable chunk comes from the federal government; the nonprofit could lose up to a third of its $3-million annual budget due to cuts by the Trump administration.
“We serve 130,000 people each year,” Birge said. “That puts in jeopardy one-third of the people we’re serving, because if I don’t find another way to raise that money, then we’ll have to scale back programs. I’ll have to consider letting go staff.” (White Pony has 17 employees and about 1,200 active volunteers.)
“We’re a seven-day-a-week operation, because people are hungry seven days a week,” Birge said. “We’ve talked about having to pull back to five or six days.”
She had no comment on Trump’s big, braggadocious celebration of self, a Soviet-style display of military hardware — tanks, horses, mules, parachute jumpers, thousands of marching troops — celebrating the Army’s 250th anniversary and, oh yes, the president’s 79th birthday.
Marivel Mendoza wasn’t so reticent.
“All of the programs that are being gutted and we’re using taxpayer dollars to pay for a parade?” she asked after a White Pony delivery truck pulled up with several pallets of fruit, veggies and other groceries.
Mendoza’s organization, which operates from a small office center in Brentwood, serves more than 500 migrant farmworkers and their families in the far eastern reaches of the Bay Area. “We’re going to see people starving at some point,” Mendoza said. “It’s unethical and immoral. I don’t know how [Trump] sleeps at night.”
Certainly not lightheaded, or with his empty belly growling from hunger.
All the food processed at White Pony Express, including these bell peppers, is checked for quality and freshness before distribution.
(Mark Z. Barabak / Los Angeles Times)
Those who work at White Pony speak of it with a spiritual reverence.
Paula Keeler, 74, took a break from her recent shift inspecting produce to discuss the organization’s beneficence. (Every bit of food that comes through the door is checked for quality and freshness before being trucked from White Pony’s Concord warehouse and headquarters to one of more than 100 community nonprofits.)
Keeler retired about a decade ago from a number-crunching job with a Bay Area school district. She’s volunteered at White Pony for the last nine years, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
“It’s become my church, my gym and my therapist,” she said, as pulsing rhythm and blues played from a portable speaker inside the large sorting room. “Tuesdays, I deliver to two senior homes. They’re mostly little women and they can go to bed at night knowing their refrigerator is full tomorrow, and that’s what touches my heart.”
Keeler hadn’t heard about Trump’s parade. “I don’t watch the news because it makes me want to throw up,” she said. Told of the spectacle and its cost, she responded with equanimity.
“It’s kind of like the Serenity Prayer,” Keeler said. “What can you do and what can’t you do? I try to stick with what I can do.”
It’s not much in vogue these days to quote Joe Biden, but the former president used to say something worth recollecting. “Don’t tell me what you value,” he often stated. “Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”
Trump’s priorities — I, me, mine — are the same as they’ve ever been. But there’s something particularly stomach-turning about squandering tens of millions of dollars on a vanity parade while slashing funds that could help feed those in need.
Michael Bagby has been volunteering at White Pony for three years, delivering food and training others to drive the nonprofit’s fleet of trucks.
(Mark Z. Barabak / Los Angeles Times)
Michael Bagby, 66, works part time at White Pony. He retired after a career piloting big rigs and started making deliveries and training White Pony drivers about three years ago. His passion is fishing — Bagby dreams of reeling in a deep-sea marlin — but no hobby can nourish his soul as much as helping others.
He was aware of Trump’s pretentious pageant and its heedless price tag.
“Nothing I say is going to make a difference whether the parade goes on or not,” Bagby said, settling into the cab of a 26-foot refrigerated box truck. “But it would be better to show an interest in the true needs of the country rather than a parade.”
His route that day called for stops at a middle school and a church in working-class Antioch, then Mendoza’s nonprofit in neighboring Brentwood.
As Bagby pulled up to the church, the pastor and several volunteers were waiting outside. The modest white stucco building was fringed with dead grass. Traffic from nearby Highway 4 produced an insistent, thrumming soundtrack.
“There are a lot of people in need. A lot,” said Tania Hernandez, 45, who runs the church’s food pantry. Eighty percent of the food it provides comes from White Pony, helping feed around 100 families a week. “If it wasn’t for them,” Hernandez said, “we wouldn’t be able to do it.”
With help, Bagby dropped off several pallets. He raised the tailgate, battened down the latches and headed for the cab. A church member walked up and stuck out his hand. “God bless you,” he said.
It’s not easy for NFL long snappers to stand out, their exacting trade hinging exclusively on repeating the same action without fail or fanfare. Yet Jake McQuaide, the former Rams two-time Pro Bowl long snapper and veteran of 14 NFL seasons, drew attention Saturday when he stood up.
McQuaide rose during Mass at an Ohio Catholic church and snapped at Jason Williams, chancellor of the Cincinnati Archdiocese, demanding answers about rumors that two priests had viewed pornography on a parish computer.
Shortly thereafter, McQuaide was removed from the sanctuary by police officers.
During the outburst, McQuaide seemed to channel Sister Aloysius — Meryl Streep’s character in the 2008 film “Doubt,” — when he loudly questioned Williams, saying “We want to put these rumors to rest. Can you answer this for me, fact or fiction?”
According to video from Cincinnati news station WCPO, when someone at the alter told McQuaide, “this is not the time for this,” McQuaide responded by shouting, “I’m sorry, sir, this is the time and the place. I will stand up. Did the priest use our parish computer to look at pornography? …True or false? True or false?”
McQuaide’s challenge occurred while Williams was reading a letter from Archbishop Robert Casey to the Our Lady of Visitation congregation that said the rumors were investigated and “no wrongdoing — either criminally or ecclesiastically — has been substantiated.” The letter also said that one of the priests was taking a “previously planned sabbatical.”
“Like gossip, the spreading of rumors is sinful, and we should all work to overcome this tendency of our fallen human nature,” the letter said.
Two Green Township police officers escorted McQuaide from the church. McQuaide was not charged, according to the police.
McQuaide grew up near Green Township and attended Cincinnati Elder High, an all-male Catholic diocesan school within the Archdiocese of Cincinnati founded in 1912.
After attending Ohio State, McQuaide served as the Rams long snapper for 10 years, beginning in 2011 when the franchise was in St. Louis and ending after the 2021 season. Since then he has played for the Dallas Cowboys, Detroit Lions, Minnesota Vikings and Miami Dolphins, having appeared in 197 career games.
Opapo, Kenya – Perched in the grass alongside the Rongo-Homa Bay Road in Kenya’s Migori County, a rusted sign announces the Melkio St Joseph Missions of Messiah Church in Africa. Beyond it, a sandy path meets big blue and purple gates that barricade the now-deserted grounds from view.
Just more than a month ago, the church in Opapo village was thrust into the spotlight when reports of secret burials and “cult-like” practices emerged.
On April 21, local police stormed the grounds and discovered two bodies buried within the fenced compound – including that of a police officer who was also a church member – as well as dozens of other worshippers who had been living there.
During the raid, 57 people were rescued and taken into custody. In the weeks since, most have been released, but police have banned them from returning to the church and sealed off the compound.
For Kenyans, the incident has unearthed the memory of other controversial churches steeped in allegations of abuse, like the 2023 case where more than 400 people linked to a church-cult starved to death in the Shakahola Forest.
In Opapo village, residents are troubled by the deathsand the decades-long secrecy surrounding the church. Many want to see the permanent closure of the compound and the exhumation and return of the bodies buried there.
Brian Juma, 27, has lived directly beside the church all his life. He told Al Jazeera locals believe it was started by a man who fashioned himself as a sort-of god figure, and who the followers of the church prayed to.
Juma claims that when the church leader died 10 years ago, followers did not immediately bury him but prayed for three days in the hope that he would rise.
Pauline Auma, a 53-year-old mother of six who also lives near the church, said the congregation was set up in their area in the early 1990s, although she could not recall the exact year.
“When it came, we thought it was a normal church like any other. I remember my sister even attended a service there, thinking it was like other churches, only to come and tell us things that were not normal were taking place. For example, she said the Father there claimed to be God himself,” Auma recounted.
In the years that followed, the church recruited members from different locations across the country. Juma said congregants were not from around the area, spoke different languages, and never left the compound to go to their own homes.
According to Caren Kiarie, a human rights activist from neighbouring Kisumu County, the church has several branches across the Kenyan Nyanza region, and sends members from one location to the other.
Many people came to worship and live within the church full time, Opapo villagers remember.
Brian Juma, a neighbour of the Melkio St Joseph Missions Church in Opapo [Dominic Kirui/Al Jazeera]
“They were very friendly people who did business around the Opapo area and interacted well with the people here,” Juma said. “But they would never live outside the church, as they all went back inside in the evening. Within the church compound, they had cattle, sheep, poultry and planted crops for their food.”
Though the worshippers could interact with outsiders, locals say the children living there – some with their parents and others who neighbours said were taken in alone – never attended school, while members were barred from seeking medical care if they were sick.
On the day of the police raid and rescue, many of the worshippers looked weak and ill, said Juma, who over the years befriended some young people whose parents belonged to the church. “They were sickly, as they were never allowed to go to the hospital or even take pain medication,” he said, quoting what his neighbours had told him. Auma believes those who were rescued that day were the sickly ones, as the others had escaped.
The 57 initially refused to leave the compound at all, insisting the church was their only “home”. But police took them to the nearby Rongo Sub-county Hospital to be treated. They again refused medical care and instead began singing Christian praise songs in the Dholuo language. Auma said the songs were chants asking God to save them and take them home to heaven.
Disturbed by the commotion, health workers recommended that they be moved from the hospital because they were making other patients uncomfortable. That’s when they were taken into police custody. According to the assistant county commissioner, Josphat Kingoku, the worshippers were released from police custody two weeks ago, but he did not know their whereabouts.
Seeking news about loved ones
In Kwoyo in Homa Bay County, Linet Achieng worries about her 71-year-old mother, who left home to join the Migori church 11 years ago and never returned.
Her mother was introduced to the church by a neighbour who was originally from Migori, Achieng said.
“Initially, she had gone to seek healing from a backache that had troubled her for years,” said the 43-year-old, explaining that the church offered promises of health.
The family initially kept in touch with their mother, asking when she would come home after being healed. She kept making promises to return, but never did. Achieng tried to convince her mother to leave the place, she said, but her attempts were in vain.
“At some point, she stopped talking to us, and when my younger brother and I went to inquire how she was doing, we were sent away from the church and told that unless we were willing to join the church, we were not welcome in there,” she said.
After the raid last month, Achieng learned her mother was among those rescued but says she does not want anything to do with her family.
While many worshipers’ families wait to hear about their relatives, one family knows for sure they will never see their loved one again.
The main entrance to the now deserted Melkio St Joseph Missions Church in Kenya’s Migori County [Dominic Kirui/Al Jazeera]
Dan Ayoo Obura – a police constable – was one of those who died at the church compound, reportedly on March 27, according to local media reports.
He had been introduced to the church by his wife, who was a leader there, his relatives said.
Obura had left his workplace at the General Service Unit police headquarters in Nairobi in February before travelling home to Kisumu County on sick leave, according to his uncle Dickson Otieno.
He was taken to a hospital in the area, but after a week at the facility, “he disappeared”, Otieno told Al Jazeera.
“We reported to the police and started looking for him everywhere, panicked that we might never see him again. Later, we had information from some neighbours that he is in Migori at a church. That’s when we went there to ask the church leaders where he was. They told us he was not at the church and had not seen him.
“About a month later, they called us to say that the person we were looking for had died the previous night and that they had buried him that day.”
The family then informed the police and human rights activists like Kiarie, and travelled to Opapo to try and locate his body.
Kiarie, who is a rights defender and paralegal at the Nyando Social Justice Centre, accompanied the family to Opapo in March.
“We’ve not been given the body,” she told Al Jazeera, explaining that she interviewed residents and church members while in Opapo and heard concerning reports about what was happening at the compound.
No one was allowed to have an intimate relationship at the church, she said, while husbands and wives were required to separate after joining. These practices were echoed by the compound’s neighbours in Migori.
“There are also serious claims of sexual violence at the church where the male leaders were having sex with the girls and women there,” Kiarie said. “That was why they did not want any man inside to touch the women because they belonged to them,” she alleged.
Kiarie said since the police raid, the compound’s neighbours have also reported there may be more than just two bodies buried inside – which she said could be what is delaying Obura’s exhumation. “They’re still waiting because they said the issue has been picked up by the national government, and they [the national authorities] want to exhume the other bodies [that may be there],” she said.
Kiarie feels the Migori church may prove to be another case like the Shakahola cult “massacre” if it is found that more people indeed died and were buried there without their families’ knowledge.
Forensic experts and homicide detectives carry the bodies of suspected members of a Christian cult named as Good News International Church, who believed they would go to heaven if they starved themselves to death, after their remains were exhumed from their graves in Shakahola Forest of Kilifi county, Kenya, April 22, 2023 [File: Reuters]
From Shakahola to Migori
The events in Migori have opened wounds for many survivors and relatives of the 429 people who were starved to death in Kilifi County’s Shakahola, in 2023.
Led by Pastor Paul McKenzie, the congregants there also left their families and abandoned property, seeking to go to heaven and meet their messiah. But news reports said that at the church, they were radicalised and brainwashed, convinced that if they stopped eating they would die peacefully, go to heaven and meet their god.
Both Grace Kazungu’s parents and two of her siblings perished in the Shakhola church cult, says the 32-year-old mother of three from Kilifi.
Whenever she and her brother tried to question the church’s teachings, the others would not hear a word against it, she told Al Jazeera.
“They would argue that we were ‘anti-Christ’ and that their church was the only sacred and holy way to heaven,” she said.
“Months later, I heard from my brother that they had sold the family’s property and were going to live inside the church after ditching earthly possessions.
“We tried to reach them but were blocked by their leader. My husband broke the news to me one morning after a year that they had been found inside the forest and they were dead and buried.”
After their deaths, they were buried in mass graves within the Shakahola Forest where the church was located. Upon discovery, following a tip from the local media, the police launched an operation to cordon off the area so they could exhume the bodies, test for DNA, and return the deceased to their relatives for proper burial.
They later arrested the church leader, McKenzie, and charged him with the murder of 191 people, child torture, and “terrorism”. He and several other co-accused remain in police custody, pending sentencing.
Unlike Shakahola, the Migori church allowed its followers to work, eat and run businesses in the nearby Opapo and Rongo towns. But like Shakahola, it also kept them living apart from the rest of society, barred them from accessing school, marriage and medical care, and severely punished supposed transgressions, according to locals who heard and witnessed violent beatings and fights inside the compound.
In many societies, religious leaders are widely respected and trusted, and they often influence beliefs and actions in the private and public spheres, explained Fathima Azmiya Badurdee, a postdoctoral researcher in the faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
“People are in search of ‘hope’ in the daily issues they confront. Religious leaders are pivotal in this role in providing hope to sustain their futures … or even in life after death,” she explained.
Still, “awareness among religious communities on opportunistic leadership and cult dynamics is needed,” she said, referring to the Opapo and Shakahola forest cases.
“Many people blindly trust religious leaders without questioning them. Words and opinions of religious leaders are taken as the gospel truth. The lack of questioning, critical thinking skills, or even the lack of religious literacy often influences individuals to believe in any extreme forms propagated by these leaders,” she added.
Police car tracks outside the church in Opapo village after it was raided [Dominic Kirui/Al Jazeera]
‘I fear she might die’
Most of the 57 Migori worshippers are now back in society once more. However, police extended the detention of four key suspects while investigations and autopsies continued this month.
Assistant county commissioner Kingoku declined to provide details to Al Jazeera about any charges against the worshippers, saying they did not appear in court.
Meanwhile, the Kenya National Police Service spokesperson Michael Muchiri told Al Jazeera: “All individuals found culpable will be taken through the prosecution process as guided by the law.”
Investigations are ongoing into Obura’s cause of death, verification of additional burials alleged by residents, and a probe into whether the church operated as an unregistered “company” rather than a licensed religious organisation.
According to the county commissioner, Mutua Kisilu, the church had been irregularly registered as a company. After the raid last month, Nyanza regional commissioner, Florence Mworoa, announced a region-wide crackdown on unregistered churches.
Muchiri said the government regulates religious outfits in the country and will bring to book all those found to have broken the law.
“Any illegally operating organisation – the government has been clear about it – is quickly shut down. Prosecution, like in the Migori case, follows. Identification of such ‘cult-like’ illegal religious entities is through the local intelligence and security teams and information from the local people,” Muchiri said.
In the meantime in Homa Bay, Achieng finally heard from her mother one last time after the worshippers were released from custody. She told her daughter that she had found a new home and that her family were “worldly” people who she should never associate with again.
“I thought of going to get her from police custody and secure her release, but I [was] worried that she will not agree to go home with me,” Achieng told Al Jazeera. She believes her mother will never return home. “I fear she might die [at the church].”
Meanwhile in Kisumu, Obura’s family continues to mourn him as they work with Kiarie’s organisation and the police to try and secure a court order allowing them to exhume his remains.
All they want, they say, is to transfer him from the church to his ancestral home to bury him according to Luo culture and traditions.
“We are not interested in a lot of things,” Otieno said. “We just want the body of our son so we can bury him here at home. Just that.”
VATICAN CITY — Throughout President Biden’s life, his religion has been a refuge. He fingers a rosary during moments of stress and often attends Mass at the church in Delaware where his son Beau is buried.
But as Biden and Pope Francis prepared for a tete-a-tete Friday at the Vatican — the president’s first stop while traveling in Europe for two international summits — both the flocks they lead, the American people and the Roman Catholic Church, are beset by divisions and contradictions that at times seem irreconcilable.
For the record:
4:56 a.m. Oct. 29, 2021A previous version of this story misstated the day of President Biden and Pope Francis’ meeting. The two leaders met Friday, not Thursday.
“They preside over fractured communities,” said Massimo Faggioli, a theology professor at Villanova University who wrote a book about Biden and Catholicism. “They face situations with many similarities.”
The two leaders met for 90 minutes early Friday afternoon, according to the White House, which was longer than expected. Later in the day, Biden said they prayed together for peace and that Francis blessed his rosary.
The president said the conversation focused on the “moral responsibility” of dealing with climate change — the topic of an upcoming summit in Glasgow, Scotland. The president added that they did not discuss abortion. Biden supports abortion rights, a contradiction of Catholic doctrine that is common among Democrats.
“We just talked about the fact that he was happy I was a good Catholic,” Biden said, adding that Francis told him he should continue to receive Communion.
It was a significant statement from the pope on an issue that has stirred political and spiritual controversy over the relationship between politicians who support abortion rights and the church.
Conservative Catholic bishops in the United States are arguing that political leaders who support abortion rights should not receive Communion — the ritual where a priest consecrates bread and wine and then shares it with believers — and the issue is slated for debate during an upcoming episcopal meeting in Baltimore. Because the proposal gained steam after Biden’s election, it’s been viewed as a rebuke of the president.
The controversy reflects an internal debate over whether the Catholic Church should broaden its appeal or adhere more strictly to its core tenets. George Weigel, a distinguished senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, said some people “claim to be Catholic and yet want to turn Catholicism into a version of liberal Protestantism.”
“What the bishops are discussing is whether Catholic political leaders who are not in full communion with the church because they act in ways that contradict settled Catholic teaching should have the integrity not to present themselves for Holy Communion,” he said.
The Vatican, however, has been wary of a debate that mixes politics and one of the church’s holiest rituals. Francis said last month that he has “never refused the Eucharist to anyone.” Since becoming pope eight years ago, he has sought to distance himself from divisive topics such as same-sex marriage while focusing on more ecumenical issues.
John K. White, professor of politics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, said the pope’s meeting with Biden “sends a message to the American bishops that denying Communion is not something that he approves of.”
The news media were not allowed into the meeting or to catch a glimpse of Biden and Francis together. The Vatican released video of part of an encounter that appeared affectionate, even chummy. At one point, Biden handed the pope a commemorative coin.
“The tradition is, and I’m only kidding about this, the next time I see you and you don’t have it, you have to buy the drinks,” said Biden, who joked that he’s probably the only Irishman that Francis has ever met who doesn’t drink.
The president bid farewell to the pope with a phrase that has become something of a trademark for him — “God love you.”
Biden and Francis have met several times before, starting with a brief encounter when Biden, then vice president, attended Francis’ papal inauguration in 2013.
Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden leaves a church in Wilmington, Del., last year after attending a confirmation Mass for his granddaughter.
(Patrick Semansky / Associated Press)
Two years later, Biden welcomed Francis to the U.S. and brought his family to a private meeting with him shortly after Beau died.
“I wish every grieving parent, brother or sister, mother or father would have had the benefit of his words, his prayers, his presence,” Biden said the following year during a visit to the Vatican, where he met Francis again.
Biden is only the second Catholic president after John F. Kennedy, who was elected in 1960. At that time, the church was still viewed with suspicion by some Americans, and Kennedy assured voters that he believed in the separation of church and state — another way of saying that he would follow the Constitution, not the pope, while in office.
Now, Catholics are represented in the highest levels of American public life. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat, is Catholic, as is one of her predecessors, John Boehner, a Republican from Ohio. The majority of Supreme Court justices are Catholic.
Biden keeps a photo of him with Francis in the Oval Office among an assortment of family photos.
The president attends Mass once a week, even when traveling. He made a point of visiting a church during a 2001 trip to China while he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“I’m going to be there on a Sunday — can I go to church somewhere?” Biden said, according to Frank Januzzi, one of the future president’s staff members at the time.
Although there were large Catholic churches in Beijing where Biden could have attended Mass, he ultimately visited what Januzzi described as a “tiny, hole-in-the-wall” parish in a village outside the Chinese capital. Biden took Communion from an elderly priest there.
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“This was an opportunity to make a statement about the importance of freedom of religion and demonstrate his own faith as well,” said Januzzi, who now leads the Mansfield Foundation, an organization dedicated to fostering U.S.-Asia relations.
White, the university professor, recalled attending Mass at a church in Bethesda, Md., in 2015 when Biden and his wife slipped in. It was unexpected, because it was not Biden’s usual parish, but Beau was hospitalized nearby with brain cancer and was near death.
Even from a distance, White said, “You could tell they were in distress.” They received Communion and exchanged the sign of peace — when parishioners shake hands and exchange greetings — and left.
Beau’s death was just one of the tragedies that have shaped Biden’s life. In 1972, his first wife and daughter were killed in a car accident shortly after he was first elected to the Senate.
“When people have tragedy, sometimes their faith goes away, or is forged in steel,” White said. “All the tragedies that have beset Biden have reinforced his faith and who he is.”
Recently elected Pope Leo XIV is the first pontiff from the United States, just as the country’s president is shaking up the global order. With both the US and the Catholic Church deeply divided, what does Pope Leo’s selection mean for Catholics in the US and worldwide?
