Biden cancels audience with Pope due to out-of-control LA wildfires

President Joe Biden has canceled his forthcoming trip to Italy that included an audience with Pope Francis.

The decision to cancel what would have been Biden’s last foreign trip as US president has been made in order to “remain focused on directing the full federal response” to wildfires raging in Los Angeles, California, the White House said.

“After returning this evening from Los Angeles, where earlier today he had met with police, fire and emergency personnel fighting the historic fires raging in the area…President Biden made the decision to cancel his upcoming trip to Italy to remain focused on directing the full federal response in the days ahead,” said the statement posted late on 8 January by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

The statement also noted that the president had “approved a Major Disaster declaration for California”.

Out-of-control wildfires sweeping across Los Angeles have led to at least five deaths, burned down hundreds of buildings and caused more than 130,000 people to flee their homes in the US’s second-largest city, reports the BBC.

Biden had been scheduled to travel to Rome from 9-12 January, with his meeting with Pope Francis scheduled for 10 January, the White House announced in December. The White House said that Biden’s audience with Pope Francis would be an opportunity to “discuss efforts to advance peace around the world”.

Biden last met with Pope Francis at the G7 summit in Puglia, Italy, on 14 June 2024. Prior to that meeting, the two met at the Vatican on 29 October 2021, when Biden “thanked His Holiness for his advocacy for the world’s poor and those suffering from hunger, conflict and persecution,” according to the US Embassy to the Holy See.

The pair also spoke by telephone in December 2024. Shortly after that call, Biden commuted the federal sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Pope Francis has regularly spoken out, along with many US Catholics, against the use of the death penalty, and did so again on 9 January in his annual speech to members of the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See.

Biden, whose visit to Italy would have occurred just days before the end of his first presidential term, was present for the start of Pope Francis’s papacy, when in his capacity as US vice president he led the United States delegation at Francis’s inaugural Mass.

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Photo: Fire personnel respond while a helicopter drops water as the fire grows in the Los Angeles suburb of Pacific Palisades, California, 7 January 2025. A fast-moving wildfire in the suburb burned buildings and sparked panic, with thousands ordered to evacuate as ‘life threatening’ winds whipped the region. Frightened residents abandoned their cars on one of the only roads in and out of the upscale Pacific Palisades area, fleeing on foot from the 770-acre (310-hectare) blaze engulfing an area crammed with multi-million dollar homes in the Santa Monica Mountains. (Photo by DAVID SWANSON/AFP via Getty Images.)

The post Biden cancels audience with Pope due to out-of-control LA wildfires first appeared on Catholic Herald.

The post Biden cancels audience with Pope due to out-of-control LA wildfires appeared first on Catholic Herald.