POPE Francis spoke with Joe Biden by telephone Thursday to offer “blessings and congratulations” to the US president-elect on his victory, the Democrat’s transition team said in a statement.
Biden has had several phone calls this week with foreign leaders, including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. They have congratulated him on winning and consider the election settled.
The pontiff’s call is the latest in a flurry of goodwill messages that has been pouring in for Biden since his projected victory over the incumbent president, Donald Trump.
This is happening despite Trump’s refusal to concede defeat. Trump claims, without evidence, that the election was stolen from him through massive but unspecified acts of fraud.
According to the statement from Biden’s transition team, president-elect Joe Biden, a lifelong Roman Catholic, thanked Francis for “extending blessings and congratulations and noted his appreciation.”
He also saluted the pontiff’s “leadership in promoting peace, reconciliation, and the common bonds of humanity around the world.”
Biden said he hopes to work with Francis on issues such as climate change, poverty and immigration.
News of the call came even as some Catholic bishops in the U.S. decline to acknowledge Biden’s victory and argue that the faithful should not back him because of his support for abortion rights.
On Tuesday, for example, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, tweeted that Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris support “the slaughter of innocents” at any point during pregnancy.
Biden has said he accepts church doctrine about abortion on a personal level, but does not want to impose that belief on everyone.
Former vice president Biden, 77, is only the second Catholic elected to the US presidency, after John F Kennedy in 1960.
During a bitter 2020 campaign against President Donald Trump, Biden quoted Pope John Paul II, frequently invoked his Irish Catholic roots and pledged to “restore the soul of America” after four years of acrimony.
He also regularly carried a rosary that belonged to his late son Beau Biden.
Pope Francis himself has had strained relations with Trump. In early 2019 he called Trump’s wall project on the US-Mexico border “madness.”
Back when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, in February 2016, the Pope made waves when he said during a visit to Mexico that someone who thinks about building walls instead of bridges “is not Christian.”
Trump fired back in a stinging statement
