One man wakes up before dawn each day for hours of prayer and meditation, eschews television and vacations, and has decried the morally bankrupting temptations of wealth, vanity and pride.

The other begins each morning feasting on morning cable news shows, has played golf more than 21 times and visited his luxury Florida resort seven times since becoming the US president, and delights in publicly eviscerating his enemies.

The personal, political, intellectual, and spiritual differences between Donald Trump and Pope Francis are vast.

But at 8.30 on Wednesday morning those differences will likely be swept aside for Trump’s first official visit to the Vatican to meet with the Argentinian pontiff, a meeting that will likely include an exchange of symbolic gifts, a private chat where only a translator will be present, and a presentation of the pope’s writings on the environment to the US president.

“It behoves neither of them to try to win an arm-wrestling match,” one person close to the Vatican wryly noted, suggesting it was in both leaders’ interest to be on their best behaviour for the face-to-face encounter.



The pair had a rocky start to their relationship. Francis is a diplomat at heart, but when he was asked about a plan by then-candidate Trump to build a wall between the US and Mexico, Francis said that a person who “thinks only about building walls … is not Christian”. In turn, Trump called the remark “disgraceful” and said no man had the right to question another man’s faith.

Donald Trump at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where he stopped before heading to the Vatican on his first world tour. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Now, more than a year later, the two are still divided on issues ranging from global warming to the need to accept and integrate migrants, but Francis has in the past shown his capacity to ignore fundamental clashes in values with other world leaders – such as in his recent meeting with Egypt’s Abdel Fatah al-Sisi – if there are other issues at stake.

In the case of Trump, the person close to the Vatican said, Francis would likely focus on the need to establish peace in Syria and across the Middle East.

The papal biographer Austen Ivereigh said the upcoming meeting would reflect Francis’s role as a pastoral pope and that he would seek to “open a door that Trump can walk through any time”.



“He will be looking to develop a relationship of trust which can later be used by both or either of them to help people or help the church. It is not about sitting down and talking about immigration or Islamic terrorism,” Ivereigh said.

Who is in Trump's entourage? Trump was joined by his full entourage on his first overseas trip as president. His innermost circle comprises his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, who is the president's closest foreign policy advisor. Just outside that circle is Hope Hicks, a former spokeswoman who has become a constant presence at Trump's side. Then there are the competing White House barons: chief ideologue Steve Bannon, chief of staff Reince Priebus, and national security adviser HR McMaster. Preibus and Bannon returned to Washington after the tour's first stop, in Saudi Arabia. Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state – and only cabinet secretary on the tour – and the outgoing acting assistant secretary of state, Stuart Jones, rank next in terms of access and influence. The next ring comprises Gary Cohn, the president's economic advisor; Dina Powell, the deputy national security advisor, who is Egyptian-born and speaks Arabic; Stephen Miller, a nationalist anti-immigration policy advisor; and Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman. Spicer's deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is also present, as is the spokesman for the national security council, Michael Anton. It is not clear is how many national security council experts have been brought along.

While the meeting will be relatively short – Trump is travelling to Sicily for the G7 meeting in Taormina and will only briefly be in Rome – there is high anticipation for the encounter. The National Catholic Reporter noted that the pope usually gives political leaders a medallion imbued with a message, like the one Francis gave Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar in March, which depicted a blooming desert.

While most meetings last about 20-30 minutes, Barack Obama – who had a warm relationship with Francis – spent nearly an hour with the pope in their first meeting in 2014, while Canada’s former prime minister Stephen Harper got only about 10 minutes, NCR noted.

After the meeting, the president’s daughter Ivanka is expected to make a stop at Sant’Egidio in Rome, a charity centre devoted to migrants, to discuss anti-trafficking efforts, while her stepmother Melania, the first lady, will visit the Bambino Gesu children’s hospital.

Even as he seeks to build a relationship with the US president for the good of his own church and the issues they have in common – including the protection of persecuted Christians in the Middle East – there is an uncomfortable reality that nevertheless sets the stage for the historic meeting: the most vocal opponents to Francis’s reform agenda within the church are also clearly aligned with the thrice-married US president.

While most meetings last about 20-30 minutes, the pope spent nearly an hour with Barack Obama during their first meeting in 2014. Photograph: Giuseppe/Pacific/Barcroft Images

They include the American cardinal Raymond Burke, who stood at the centre of a recent challenge to the pope’s authority over the fate of the Knights of Malta, an ancient Catholic order. Francis recently denied he felt any animosity toward Burke but the cardinal reportedly has been in email contact with Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist.

At the same time, progressive forces within the church are seeking to play an active role to resist the US president’s policies. Francis’s recent appointment in the US, Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, is seen as embodying many of the values that Francis holds dear, and has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s policy pronouncements, especially on issues related to migration.

Earlier this month, Tobin described the response of the church to anti-immigration policies in stark terms, reportedly evoking a scene from a novel about Italian fascism in front of an interfaith audience, according to a report in the Crux, a Catholic news website.

“What keeps despots, dictators awake at night, what topples evil empires is the little person who goes into the square in the middle of town in the dark of the night and scrawls on the wall, ‘No.’ And I want to say to you, we are the ‘No’ that God scrawls on the wall,” Tobin said.