Popes at the White House: A brief history

After wrapping up a trip to Cuba, Pope Francis will become the third pope to visit the White House when he visits the nation’s capital this week.

The first meeting of a sitting pope and president was between President Woodrow Wilson and Pope Benedict XV on Jan. 4, 1919, in Vatican City.
 
{mosads}Former Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford would all make trips to the Vatican in the coming years.

Pope John Paul II was the first pope to visit the White House, meeting with President Jimmy Carter on Oct. 6, 1979.

The next time a pope visited the White House didn’t come until nearly 30 years later, when Pope Benedict XVI had a three-day stay in Washington in April 2008 and met with President George W. Bush.

And this week, President Obama’s will welcome Pope Francis to the nation’s capital. The two previously met in the Vatican in 2014.

The pope will stop in D.C. before traveling to New York and Philadelphia.