President Barack Obama and Pope Francis will meet for the first time in March, during an encounter the White House said would be focused on tackling the disturbing growth in inequality.

“The president will continue on to Vatican City on 27 March to meet with His Holiness, Pope Francis,” Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, said in a statement on Tuesday.

“The president looks forward to discussing with Pope Francis their shared commitment to fighting poverty and growing inequality.”

Bridging the growing gap between rich and poor has become a priority for both leaders, although they come to the issue from different standpoints.

Francis, who made his name caring for the poor in Buenos Aires, Argentina, has won plaudits from Catholics and secularists alike for his impassioned plea to ameliorate suffering in the poorest corners of the world.

Obama has made addressing rising poverty a priority for his administration, but remains focused on arresting a three-decade-long trend of declining social immobility, which he says has damaged the economy and undermined confidence in the American dream.

Obama’s encounter with the pope will cap a four-day trip to Europe, during which he will also meet Italy’s president, Giorgio Napolitano, and the prime minister, Enrico Letta, in Rome, and attend two summits, in the Netherlands and Brussels.

It will be the president's second visit to the Vatican since becoming president. When he met Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, the pair had a 30-minute conversation that reportedly included poverty, as well as discussion about stem cell research, abortion and the Middle East.

The new pope’s mission against poverty culminated in an 84-page apostolic exhortation, published in November, in which he called for the Catholic church to be decentralised to enable it to counteract an economic system that “tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits”.

In the papal document, Francis made a point of praying for secular leadership. “I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor,” he wrote.

Eight days later, Obama delivered one of his most talked-about speeches on the decline of social mobility in America, declaring the fight against inequality “the defining challenge of our time”.

“Some of you may have seen just last week, the pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length,” Obama remarked in the speech, going on to repeat Francis's lament: “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”

Since then, Obama has repeatedly said that tackling inequality will be the focus of his presidency for the remainder of his time in office.

That commitment was reiterated in a 17,000-word New Yorker article written by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, who followed Obama on a west coast fundraising trip, witnessing the president “rattling the cup in one preposterous mansion after another”.

“I can tell you that I will measure myself at the end of my presidency in large part by whether I began the process of rebuilding the middle class and the ladders into the middle class, and reversing the trend toward economic bifurcation in this society,” Obama told Remnick.

Addressing inequality is widely expected to be the centerpiece of Obama’s state of the union address later this month, although critics question whether the president’s ambitious declarations constitute much more than political jockeying ahead of the mid-term elections.

Democrats are forcing Republicans into a series of embarrassing votes on legislation to address poverty, but there is little if any evidence of the kind of bipartisan agreement required to make any of the bills into law.

A proposal to temporarily restore long-term unemployment benefits, which have been been cut for 1.5 million jobseekers, with devastating impacts across the country, have stalled in the Senate after opposition from Republicans.

Democrats believe votes such as these will hurt Republicans in the polls. A Gallup poll released on Monday found 67% of Americans are dissatisfied with the distribution of income and wealth in the US.

After initially making grand promises about unemployment insurance cuts, the White House and Democratic leaders appear to have momentum building behind letting the controversy melt away. Similarly, although Obama has thrown his weight behind proposals to increase the national minimum wage – another issue that will sharpen the divide between Democrats and Republicans in November's elections – he has so far resisted using his executive authority to introduce a mandatory minimum wage for federally contracted employees.

Such a measure, which has long been advocated by poverty campaigners, could benefit up to 2 million workers on federal contracts.

But issues relating to poverty in America are unlikely to feature highly when Obama meets Francis, whose recently appointed cardinals include men from impoverished countries including Haiti, Burkina Faso and Nicaragua.

Instead, the president is likely to be drawn into a debate about global poverty – one in which the country he leads is often perceived to be at fault.

A study published by Oxfam on Monday revealed the richest 85 people on the globe control as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people. Those super-rich individuals are more likely to live in the US than anywhere else in the world. Forbes, which ranked the world’s 1,426 billionaires, found that 442 of them – roughly a third – reside in the US.

Many of the world’s elite are meeting this week at the exclusive Swiss ski resort at Davos, where Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, will arrive on Thursday. The World Economic Forum identified the rising gap between rich and poor as the greatest threat to global stability over the next decade.

On the eve of the gathering, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, reiterated that message. “Business and political leaders at the World Economic Forum should remember that in far too many countries the benefits of growth are being enjoyed by far too few people,” she said in an interview with the Financial Times. “This is not a recipe for stability and sustainability.”

In a message to the annual gathering of at Davos, Francis praised the "fundamental role" modern business has played in helping improve healthcare, education and communications. But he said that progress has often been achieved alongside widespread social exclusion of the poor. "I ask you to ensure that humanity is served by wealth and not ruled by it," he said.