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After meeting with Muslim leaders in Saudi Arabia and visiting sacred sites in Jerusalem, American President Donald Trump's tour of world religions concluded Wednesday at the Vatican, the Catholic Church's holy headquarters.
There, at the Apostolic Palace, Trump met with Pope Francis -- finally.
It's a meeting millions have been waiting for, an encounter between two of the world's most intriguing and complex characters: The holy man in white who preaches good news to the poor and the brash businessman in the dark suit who embodies American extravagance.
After months of talking -- and tweeting -- past one another, and a very public spat over international borders, the Pope and President met at last, with nary a barrier between them.
A boxing promoter might have been tempted to call it the "Sistine Showdown." Churchmen, alas, offer more sober sobriquets.
"It will be a meeting without 'walls,'" said the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a close associate of the Pope and the editor of the Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica.
Walls, of course, were the subject of their famous feud.
No transcript of Trump and Pope Francis's meeting will be given out.
Shortly after celebrating a large outdoor Mass at the Mexican border last year, Francis said that people who think only of building barriers instead of bridges are "not Christian." Trump dismissed the comments as "disgraceful" and called the Pope a pawn of the Mexican government.
Still, the Pope continued to condemn Trump-like political rhetoric, even if he never named Trump himself. The day before the presidential election, he warned Christians not to be tempted by "the false security of physical or social walls."
"Dear brothers and sisters," he said, "all walls fall. All of them. Do not be fooled."
After the election, several of Francis' closest American allies picked up the Pope's banner, sounding ready to lead an anti-Trump resistance.
"What keeps despots, dictators awake at night, what topples evil empires is the little person who goes into the square in the middle of the town in the dark of the night and scrawls on the wall, 'No,'" Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, said earlier this month at a rally to support a Mexican immigrant threatened with deportation.
"And I want to say to you, we are the 'No' that God scrawls on the wall."
(CNN)
