Biden has previously met Pope Francis on three occasions, but this will be his first face-to-face meeting with the pope as the country’s second Catholic president.
The meeting between the president and the pope is scheduled to start at noon and last for about an hour.
According to the White House, Biden plans to discuss “ending the COVID-19 pandemic, tackling the climate crisis, and caring for the poor.”
Biden and his administration have taken a number of steps to fund abortion, which Pope Francis has repeatedly called “murder.”
Ahead of their Oct. 29 meeting, a White House spokeswoman acknowledged that “the pope has spoken differently” than Biden on abortion.
Biden, a Catholic, “is somebody who stands up for and believes that a woman’s right to choose is important,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said
Pope Francis previously met Biden in 2015, during his visit to the U.S., when Biden was vice president. The next year the two exchanged a greeting during a Vatican conference on regenerative medicine, at which Biden spoke. Biden also met Francis at his papal inauguration in March 2013.
The Prime Minister of India
Seven years after assuming the office of prime minister, Modi will meet the pope for the first time on Oct. 30 at 8:30 a.m.
While Pope Francis has already visited both South Korea and the United States, the pope has yet to make a trip to India, which has not received a papal visit since John Paul II traveled to Delhi in 1999.
The leader of the world’s second-most populous country is meeting the pope at a time when there have been religious freedom concerns within India under the leadership of Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
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The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom listed India as a “country of particular concern” for religious freedom in 2020 for the first time in more than a decade.
The Indian prime minister’s office has not released further details of what he hopes to discuss with the pope, but has said that during his time in Rome he will participate in discussions on “global economic and health recovery from the pandemic, sustainable development, and climate change” at the G20 summit.
Following the summit in Rome, Modi will head to Glasgow for the U.N. climate summit (COP26).
Other leaders coming to Italy for the high-security G20 summit include Germany’s Angela Merkel, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Pope Francis recently sent a message to the G20 Interfaith Forum, which brings religious leaders together to develop policy recommendations to be delivered to G20 Summit leaders.
The pope emphasized the role of religious leaders in combating religious extremism and fundamentalism, especially when it leads to violence.