President Donald Trump said Monday he will attend the funeral for Pope Francis in Vatican City, the papal enclave in Rome.
Some questioned whether the president would make the trip given his public rift with Francis on issues like immigration, which garnered headlines as recently as this weekend.
“Melania and I will be going to the funeral of Pope Francis, in Rome,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “We look forward to being there!”
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Complete funeral arrangements have not been finalized for Francis, who died Monday morning at 88. Late pontiffs are typically buried four to six days after their death, and a ceremony takes place outside in St. Peter’s Square to accommodate an influx of mourners.
Francis requested to be buried in Rome at the Basilica of St. Mary Major, breaking with a longtime tradition of being buried at the Vatican.
Trump, 78, spoke glowingly of Francis on Monday—an about-face from the rhetoric he has used previously.
“He’s a very good man who loved the world,” Trump said Monday. “He especially loved people that were having a hard time, and that’s good with me.”
Trump and Francis’ public feud dates back to 2013, when Trump, then two years away from entering the political scene, scoffed at Francis’ frugality.
“I don’t like seeing the Pope standing at the checkout counter (front desk) of a hotel in order to pay his bill,” Trump tweeted. “It’s not Pope-like!”
Francis hit back at Trump years later as a Republican presidential candidate campaigning on building a border wall and carrying out mass deportations. Francis said such policy beliefs made Trump “not Christian.”
“I’d just say that this man is not Christian, if he said it in this way,” Francis told reporters in February 2016. “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges is not Christian.”
Trump, of course, wasted no time firing back.
“If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which, as everyone knows, is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened,” his campaign said in a statement. “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful.”
The two men met for the first time in 2017—four months into Trump’s first White House stint—at the Vatican. A photo went viral showing Trump beaming while Francis scowled, but their statements after the meeting were positive. Francis said he even gifted Trump a signed-and-bound copy of his remarks from World Peace Day.
“Honor of a lifetime to meet His Holiness Pope Francis,” Trump said after their meeting. “I leave the Vatican more determined than ever to pursue PEACE in our world.”
Things turned sour again in recent months.
Francis described Trump’s mass deportation plans as a “major crisis” in February.
“The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” he wrote in a letter.
