A funny thing happened when President Joe Biden visited Pope Francis at the Vatican.

The event actually made news, especially with Biden quotes about what allegedly happened in private.

In fact, it was big news across the media ecosystem — from the mainstream press to Catholic news sites — because of 20 words the president uttered to reporters in Rome after the face-to-face had already taken place.

“We just talked about the fact that he was happy I’m a good Catholic and I should keep receiving Communion,” Biden said.

With those words, Biden grabbed plenty of favorable headlines (much needed ones if you look at his sagging poll numbers as of late) online throughout the day and into the weekend. At the same time, it widened the rift between the pope and a group of U.S. bishops because of Biden’s support for abortion. Thus, it will lead to further conflict between Biden and those same bishops.

Given the love many in the press had given Biden even before the meeting, none of this should come as a surprise. The rush to accept Biden’s claim — while Vatican officials declined to confirm it — has shaped mainstream news coverage of this encounter.

Biden continued to get great headlines a day after the meeting and into Sunday when he boldly attended Mass at St. Patrick’s Church in Rome, where he received Communion. It’s worth noting that Biden was not given Communion by the pope during his private meeting. It’s also worth noting that the pope serves as the bishop of Rome.

Why all the glowing headlines, built on the acceptance of Biden’s second-hand quote from Pope Francis?

Biden’s words fit the popular news narrative on the Communion issue, beginning with the label that the president is a “devout Catholic,” even as his words and actions undercut Catholic doctrine. Far too many news accounts were happy to take Biden’s words at face value — perhaps because doing so validated their own beliefs on the issue. It amounted to a papal dispensation.

The skepticism that the press usually reserves for politicians and their self-serving statements — no fact checks here, unlike those in the Donald Trump administration — was missing in action.

My own news story of the meeting for Religion Unplugged — based on what the Vatican press office made public and Biden’s comments in Rome later that day — featured the headline, “Biden says Pope Francis called him a ‘good Catholic’ as Vatican declines to comment.” It was an attempt at fairness given we have no way of knowing whether the pope ever said those words.

Once again, the Vatican didn’t confirm whether the pope had told Biden that he should continue to receive Holy Communion. And, unlike past meetings between Pope Francis and a head of state, the Vatican did not allow reporters to be present when the president and the pontiff met inside the papal library, citing COVID-19 concerns. A live video feed of the meeting was also not provided.

Nevertheless, the New York Times — under the headline “Biden: Pope said he should receive communion, despite U.S. bishops’ rift on abortion rights” — opened its hard-news story (as opposed to an analysis feature) this way:

President Biden told reporters on Friday that Pope Francis had called him a “good Catholic” and said he should keep receiving communion, an unexpected development that appeared to put a papal finger on the scale in a debate raging in the United States’ Roman Catholic Church over whether the president and other Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should be denied the sacrament.

In response to reporters who asked if Francis had told him during their private 75-minute audience at the Vatican whether he should keep receiving communion, Mr. Biden replied, “Yes.”

Asked to confirm Mr. Biden’s remarks, Matteo Bruni, the Vatican spokesman, said the Holy See limited its comments to the news release about subjects discussed during the meeting and added, “It’s a private conversation.”

With summits of the world’s economic powers promising few concrete takeaways, the pope’s apparently explicit encouragement for Mr. Biden to continue taking communion could be one of the most tangible accomplishments that the president brings home.

“A very strong choice,” said Alberto Melloni, a church historian in Rome, adding that he believed “the pope wanted people to know, and he wanted the American bishops not to take that path” toward denying Catholic politicians communion.

So much for journalistic skepticism.

The paragraph containing the phrase “the pope’s apparently explicit encouragement for Mr. Biden to continue taking communion could be one of the most tangible accomplishments that the president brings home” summed up the day. Indeed, this analysis can’t be argued with given the news coverage the president received in the mainstream press.

As the bishops meet in Baltimore next month to work on a document that may encourage bishops to discipline politicians who support abortion, the progressive bishops in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops now have an argument they can make to kill this document.

The Times did give space to bishops who argue that Biden and other lawmakers need to uphold church teaching in order to remain Catholics in good standing. When quoting a tweet from Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, R.I., the Times team labeled him an “arch-conservative.” Further down in the story, when describing Cardinal Raymond Burke’s letter posted to his website before the meeting, the newspaper of record noted, “Some prelates who hoped Francis might reprimand Mr. Biden have also spent years trying to undercut the pope’s authority.”

The Associated Press story used more neutral language, but also seemed to take Biden’s word for what was said in the meeting. This is how the AP opened their story:

Face to face at the Vatican, President Joe Biden held extended and highly personal talks with Pope Francis on Friday and came away saying the pontiff told him he was a “good Catholic” and should keep receiving Communion, although conservatives have called for him to be denied the sacrament because of his support for abortion rights.

The world’s two most prominent Roman Catholics ran overtime in their discussions on climate change, poverty and the coronavirus pandemic, a warm conversation that also touched on the loss of president’s adult son and included jokes about aging well.

Biden said abortion did not come up in the meeting. “We just talked about the fact he was happy that I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving Communion,” Biden said.

Ditto for USA Today. Here is the opening of that news story:

President Joe Biden said Friday that Pope Francis told him during a private meeting at the Vatican that he should continue to receive communion, raising doubts about the future of a movement by some conservative bishops to punish politicians who support abortion rights.

Biden told reporters that abortion, a subject on which they disagree, didn't come up during their nearly 90-minute meeting. Instead, Biden said, "We just talked about the fact he was happy that I was a good Catholic, and I should keep receiving communion."

Biden said the pope blessed his rosary and that he said a prayer with the pontiff. "And he said one for me," he said.

How about CNN? The network published this on its website:

President Joe Biden said Friday that Pope Francis told the President that he should continue receiving communion, and the Pope is happy that Biden is a "good Catholic."

The revelation of the Pope's words to Biden come after American bishops moved forward with a plan that tried to permit individual bishops to deny communion to politicians who support abortion rights, setting up a potential public rebuke of Biden along with other prominent Catholic Democrats, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Biden revealed the details of his lengthy talks with Francis as he was greeting Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi in Rome.

Asked if he discussed abortion with Francis, Biden said he hadn't.

"We just talked about the fact he was happy I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving communion," Biden said.

You get the picture. Meanwhile, in conservative Catholic media, the coverage was more skeptical, which meant sticking to the basic facts that were on the record.

The National Catholic Register, owned by Francis’ least-favorite news outlet EWTN, ran a Catholic News Agency story that featured this headline, “Vatican Declines to Comment on Whether Pope Francis Told Biden to Keep Receiving Communion in ‘Private Conversation’.” This is how that story opened:

The Vatican declined to comment Friday on U.S. President Joe Biden’s statement that Pope Francis encouraged him to keep receiving Holy Communion during a private audience.

The Vatican, which has a long-standing policy of not commenting on specific statements attributed to the pope during private meetings, emphasized that the encounter between the two men on Oct. 29 was “a private conversation.”

Matteo Bruni, the director of the Holy See press office, told reporters: “I would consider it a private conversation, and it is limited to what was said in the public statement.”

Bruni was referring to a press release issued by the Vatican saying that the two men spoke about the environment, the coronavirus pandemic, refugees, and human rights.

The folks over at The Pillar ran a news analysis the day after the meeting that did a wonderful job providing context and what could happen next. Here’s a key section from Ed Condon’s piece:

The USCCB has been grappling for more than a year, at least, with three vexing questions: How central the issue of abortion should be to their policy agenda, how to discuss the Catholic faith of pro-abortion politicians like Biden, and whether the Church’s moral and canonical discipline should be invoked in situations like Biden’s.

In a sentence-and-a-half Friday, Biden flatly claimed the pope had resolved all three.

From now until the U.S. bishops meet in Baltimore in just over two weeks, Biden’s quote will dominate discussion, especially in relation to the bishops’ draft document on the Eucharist.

Although that text was never likely to include explicit mention of the president, or attempt to proscribe disciplinary action against Catholic politicians in relation to the Eucharist, it was certain that at least some bishops would raise those issues from the floor during its debate.

Perhaps some still will, but it is now a near certainty that they will be answered with the president’s quote — which will likely be treated as an effectively verbatim account of whatever Francis said to Biden in private.

But is it? Of course, we will never know. The Vatican has already declined to comment on Biden’s remarks, insisting that what was said in private should remain private. Pope Francis, and indeed popes as a rule, never comment on the contents of private conversations with public figures, however dramatically they might be represented by their interlocutors.

Yes, don’t expect Pope Francis or the Vatican press office to provide any clarity here. This means that progressive Catholics will walk away happy that Biden is their Avatar for what it means to be a “good Catholic.”

Most journalists embraced that view long ago. They have been calling Biden “devout” and the “most religiously observant” president in decades — even though that’s an opinion and something that can’t be measured. For traditionalists, meanwhile, Biden is potentially a liar who needs to be somehow reprimanded.

Condon also noted the following, while noting other ways of interpreting the encounter between Biden and Pope Francis:

It is, of course, entirely possible that the pope referred to the president as a “good Catholic” in the course of their conversation, more than an hour long, across a range of topics on which they are likely to have broadly agreed.

It’s also possible that Francis paid the compliment lightly, perhaps in response to the president similarly calling him a “great pope” or something similar.

It’s equally plausible that the “good Catholic” label, itself something of an English idiom, was how Biden described himself in some way to the pope, in which case it would be surprising if Francis hadn’t said he was glad to hear it.

Between all three possibilities is a range of implication and emphasis, none of which puts the apparent papal assessment of the president’s Catholicism exactly next to his suitability for Communion and the issue of abortion, which is how the question-and-answer with Biden framed it on Friday.

The battle between Catholics on the left and right is seen as a largely American issue, especially in the Italian press where the pope gets plenty of coverage. The Biden visit was page one news there as well.

Il Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s most reputable dailies and politically centrist, reported on the meeting this way:

The Trump era had already closed at the end of June, when the hearing with the new U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had finished melting the chill that had accompanied the years of “The Donald” in the White House. And now the meeting between Pope Francis and Joe Biden is like a new beginning, not without its problems but supported by mutual respect.

A meeting that lasted an hour and a quarter, an unusual duration confirming the relationship between the two. And with an outcome destined to make a lot of noise in the United States: To reporters who asked him if during the meeting the two had addressed the issue of his (favorable) position on abortion, Biden said that no, the issue was not confronted, but that the pope told him that he was happy that he was “a good Catholic,” and that “he should continue to receive communion.”

Over at Il Foglio, a right-wing newspaper, the coverage noted that the meeting focused on other issues. Here’s an excerpt:

Joe Biden has let the world know that the pope has told him that he is “a good Catholic” and that he can continue to receive communion. Having satisfied the curiosity of those who thought that Francis could, receiving the president of the United States at the Vatican, tell him that he cannot approach the Eucharist (a matter of mere American interest), the real news is the duration of the audience: 75 minutes.

That’s well more than the 50 granted to Barack Obama and more than double the time reserved for Donald Trump. The ritual communiqué issued at the end of the vis-à-vis clarifies the issues discussed: common commitment to the protection and care of the planet, health situation and the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, refugees and assistance “to migrants.” In addition, very relevant is the confirmation that Biden and Francesco have spoken of “the protection of human rights, including the right to freedom of religion and conscience.”

Finally, La Repubblica, a left-wing newspaper whose editor has made news in the past regarding this pope and his more progressive leanings on a variety of issues, teased the meeting this way:

The pope’s benevolence towards communion with the American president is a message to the U.S. bishops.

They, too, used Biden’s quotes with little concern about whether his words were true or not.

It’s something we saw a lot of on this side of the Atlantic as well. It’s also something that will continue to make news as debates rage on about bishops denying Catholic politicians access to Holy Communion.

FIRST IMAGE: Photo provided by the White House press office, as featured at The Pillar.