President Obama “will host an elaborate arrival ceremony at the White House for Pope Francis on Wednesday morning in a highly symbolic encounter between the political leader of the world’s most powerful nation and the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics,” the New York Times reports.
“As it happens, in a historical aberration, Mr. Obama will host such a ceremony twice in one week, with President Xi Jinping of China visiting the White House on Friday. But the pope has generated a wave of excitement in a normally jaundiced capital that ordinary national leaders rarely produce.”
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