President Joe Biden: ‘The Pope and I Are on the Same Page’

ROME — U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters Monday that he and Pope Francis are “on the same page” regarding the crisis in Gaza.

As Breitbart News reported, Pope Francis telephoned President Biden on Sunday to discuss the best way to address “the latest developments in Israel and Gaza,” the White House said in a statement.

Speaking with journalists Monday, Biden said the pontiff could not have been more supportive of current U.S. policy in the area.

“The pope and I are on the same page. He was very, very interested in what we are doing to deal with some of the crises we are facing, particularly in Israel this time around,” Biden stated.

“I laid out to him what the gameplan was, how we thought we should be providing the kind of assistance to Israel that it needed,” he added, and the pope was “across the board, supportive of what we’re doing.”

In the conversation between the two leaders, Biden “condemned the barbarous attack by Hamas against Israeli civilians and affirmed the need to protect civilians in Gaza,” the White House statement said.

Israeli officials have lamented that no such straightforward condemnation has come from the Vatican, which has avoided laying blame on either side.

In particular, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen has criticized the Vatican’s lukewarm response to the Hamas terror attack in Gaza, calling for an “unequivocal condemnation” of the lethal aggression.

Cohen told the Holy See’s foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, that Israel “expects the Vatican to come out with a clear and unequivocal condemnation of the murderous terrorist actions of Hamas terrorists who harmed women, children and the elderly for the sole fact that they are Jews and Israelis.”

“It is unacceptable that you put out a statement expressing worry primarily for Gazan civilians while Israel is burying 1,300 who were murdered,” Cohen said.

In an October 23 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Incoherence of Pope Francis,” writer Bill McGurn said that the Vatican “offers confusion instead of clarity in Gaza” and other parts of the world, such as Ukraine and China.

The pope’s “insistence on defining the problem as war itself” rather than unjustified armed aggression “suggests moral equivalence,” McGurn wrote, which leaves people confused as to the Vatican’s commitment to justice.

For his part, Mr. Biden has continually run afoul of the United States bishops because of his positions on abortion, religious freedom, and transgenderism, despite fawning mainstream media descriptions of the president as a “devout Catholic.”

Follow @tdwilliamsrome