Pope Francis to meet with President Obama on Thursday

[ucrdem]

not too many pics up yet but there's this on the Vatican Radio website :

US President Barack Obama’s trip to Rome on March 27 will be his first audience with Pope Francis.

It will be the second time that President Barack Obama has been received at the Vatican, after an audience with Pope Benedict XVI on July 10, 2009.

Barack Obama is the ninth US President to make ​​an official visit to the Vatican. The first, Woodrow Wilson, received by Pope Benedict XV after the end of the First World War.

(snip)

President Obama’s first meeting with a Pope occurred in he visited Rome in 2009. His upcoming audience with Pope Francis will take place in the context of a complex phase of the administration's relations with the Church of the United States, marked, in particular, by controversy on the implementation of health care reform (the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” commonly known as “Obamacare”) having to do with rules on mandatory health care coverage of sterilization, contraception, and abortion; and on other issues at the centre of public debate in the United States, such as the legalization of homosexual marriages.

http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2014/03/26/pope_francis_to_meet_with_president_obama_on_thursday/en1-784960

photo link: http://news.yahoo.com/both-self-styled-uniters--pope-francis-and-president-obama-remain-deeply-divided-162848416.html