White House suggests Benedict XVI didn’t want Biden at his funeral

( LifeSite )

The White House has appeared to suggest that the late Pope Benedict XVI did not want President Joe Biden at his funeral.

Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed at Tuesday’s briefing that Biden will not be traveling to Rome for Benedict’s funeral on Thursday, January 5. Joe Donnelly, the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, will be representing the country instead.

Notably, Jean-Pierre added that Donnelly’s attendance in Biden’s stead is “in line with the wishes of the late pope and the Vatican.”

“This is what their requests were. This is what their wishes were,” she said.

It is currently unclear if the Vatican or the late pontiff refused to extend an invitation to Biden because of the president’s highly publicized political stances at odds with Church teaching. The Vatican has not responded to LifeSiteNews’ request for comment.

Biden appointed Donnelly, a Democratic former U.S. senator from Indiana, as his ambassador to the Vatican in October 2021. Like the president, Donnelly is a professed Catholic who nevertheless is known to promote access to abortion, LGBT ideology, and same-sex “marriage.”

Further speculation over Biden’s non-attendance was fueled after a group of reporters met the president before he boarded a Marine One helicopter late Wednesday morning. When asked why he wasn’t attending Benedict’s funeral, Biden briefly sparred with the reporter and then claimed “we would just get in the way” because “it would take an entourage of 1,000 people to show up.”

A Biden administration spokeswoman told The Daily Signal that the president “asked” Donnelly to attend Benedict’s funeral, but she elaborated only with a brief reference to “what the Vatican has said publicly about official delegations.”