Sometimes, the calendar isn’t friendly to columnists and podcasters.

This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) was recorded before the lengthy, closed-door chat (with photo ops before and after) between Pope Francis and the “devout” Catholic President Joe Biden. Thus, host Todd Wilken and I took a kind of “tomorrow’s headlines” approach, surveying the advance coverage of the meeting and some fascinating features that looked at images and the realities of some previous pope-president meetings.

In this podcast I predicted that the headlines and public pronouncements would focus on their agreements about the environment, immigration, poverty and COVID-19 strategies.

Why? Well, the mainstream press believes that these meetings are, first and foremost, political events and these are political topics, even though they clearly have doctrinal content for those with the eyes to see that.

Biden and the pope agree on these subjects and, at this point, the progressive Pope Francis has little or no motivation to hurt a Catholic progressive in the White House. They have many of the same goals and they, to be blunt, have all the same enemies — especially among American Catholics who wear the red hats that mark them as cardinals (and those who have not received red hats).

Would anything significant happen in the private discussions?

That’s the kind of question that Catholic publications will probe and, here at GetReligion, I’ll leave commentary on that topic to Clemente Lisi (it helps that he is fluent in Italian).

If you are looking for a perfect summary of the elite press template for coverage of this meeting, and the ties that bind these two modern Catholics, this block of Washington Post material — from a political-desk story, of course — is pitch perfect:

… The resonance is also personal, given the similarities between the 84-year-old pope and the 78-year-old president, who have in a sense become allies. Both attained ultimate leadership late in their lives and quickly moved in a liberal direction. They have faced internal resistance. Both are treated warily by conservative American bishops.

“Both could have become pope or president earlier, but it didn’t work out,” said John Carr, founder of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University. “Both were written off, Biden in the campaign and Bergoglio before the conclave, and both were surprises.” (Francis’s given name is Jorge Mario Bergoglio.)

Carr added that Biden and Francis “now are in a position to act on what they believe. But they both also have a lot of the same adversaries.”

Biden and Francis are each fighting to change a culture after a predecessor they regarded as rigid and insufficiently inclusive, igniting angry opposition that is proving perhaps more potent than they may have anticipated.

Ah, Pope Benedict XVI is to Pope Francis what President Donald Trump is to Biden?

That’s a bit of a reach, methinks. I would also imagine that Catholics who embrace the traditional Latin Mass would disagree with that claim that Francis is known for his flexibility.

Sure enough, here is the early word on the content of today’s meetings, care of the journalism college of cardinals that is The New York Times:

During their meeting, Mr. Biden thanked Francis for his advocacy for the world’s poor and people suffering from hunger, conflict and persecution, the White House said, adding that he had also lauded the pope’s leadership in the climate crisis and his advocacy on coronavirus vaccines.

Francis has repeatedly called on pharmaceutical companies to waive intellectual property protections for their coronavirus vaccines on the grounds that doing so would be a “gesture of humanity.” In May, Mr. Biden said he supported the suspension of some of those, but large manufacturers have argued that scaling up production is a more effective way to help end the pandemic.

There were also a few jokes, a baseball story from the president and some chatting about Irish Catholics and drinking. Clearly, a meeting of friends.

So take that, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. And, especially, take that Archbishop (not cardinal) Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco and Archbishop (not cardinal) Jose Gomez, the Latino leader of the massive and symbolic Archdiocese of Angeles. Meanwhile, all of this is good news in Catholic circles in places like Newark, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Were there — in the long, long closed-door talks — private discussions of Biden’s words and deeds that have clashed with centuries of church teachings on abortion, euthanasia, gender, marriage and sexuality?

Maybe there was a strategic reminder that it would help BOTH of these men if Biden refrained from performing any more same-sex marriage rites and bashing church teachings on this subject?

Did they discuss whether Biden could back some compromises on abortion if the U.S. Supreme Court rejects or weakens Roe v. Wade? Maybe the kinds of compromises that Biden used to support?

Perhaps historians will, someday, get their hands on materials that would answer these kinds of questions. That has happened in the past.

This leads me to that photo, at the start of this post, of St. Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan.

Readers who are interested in the history of all this, I would recommend reading a Religion News Service advance story that ran with this headline: “A look back at the history of US presidential visits to the Vatican.”

The section dealing with the multiple meetings between Reagan and John Paul II is short, but interesting.

When Reagan and John Paul II met for the first time at the Vatican on June 7, 1982, they already had much in common. In 1981, they both survived assassination attempts, and they viewed their meeting as a divine sign that they had a purpose to fulfill. “God saved us both,” John Paul II reportedly said, “so that we can do what we are about to do. How else can it be explained?”

The meeting, which lasted 50 minutes, marked the first time a pope and a president spoke alone behind closed doors. The two had exchanged a flurry of letters in the months leading up to the meeting, addressing the future of Europe and an end to the escalating nuclear tensions.

For the next six years, the Reagan and John Paul II partnership reshaped Europe amid the tumult of the Cold War, revealing the potential of a union between two global and moral superpowers.

Apparently there was more to these encounters than musings on death and the future of Europe.

Because of private conversations with Catholic members of his White House inner circle, Reagan had become fascinated with a specific set of mysterious Catholic revelations. He wanted input from the occupant of the Chair of St. Peter.

Any public mention of this discussion would have been explosive, to say the least. Here is a bite of an “On Religion” column that I wrote on this topic:

The secret topic, at Reagan's request: The visions of Our Lady of Fatima to three children in Portugal in 1917, including prophecies linking St. Mary, Russia and, the world would later learn, the shooting of a "bishop in white." This was crucial information about John Paul II.

The pope believed Mary intervened to save his life on May 13, 1981, when an assassin tied to Bulgarian spies and Soviet military intelligence gunned him down in St. Peter's Square — on the 64th anniversary of the first Fatima vision.

The pope needed six pints of blood to survive. Reagan required eight pints during surgery after he was shot six weeks earlier, on March 30th. He was convinced his survival was part of a divine plan, which Reagan called the "DP."

Reagan met John Paul II for the first time a year after the shootings. He told the pope: "Look how the evil forces were put in our way and how Providence intervened."

Reagan’s daring “tear down this wall” speech in Berlin followed one of these face-to-face discussions with John Paul II, with the president refusing to delete those explosive words from his text (as requested by diplomats in the State Department).

None of that made it into the headlines, of course.

Enjoy the podcast and, please, share it with others.

FIRST IMAGE: Photo of St. Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan, from the photo archives of the Reagan Foundation.