WASHINGTON, May 28 (UPI) -- As President John F. Kennedy was on his way to his audience with the pope, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who accompanied him, warned him that Pope Paul VI might raise the issue of the United States establishing diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
Years later, Andreotti would recall Kennedy's reaction: As a Catholic, Kennedy told the Italian premier, he had to be cautious in his relations with the Vatican so as to avoid angering American anti-Catholics. He said he was worried that even his audience might have a negative political impact.
For a while they rode on in silence, then Kennedy told Andreotti in confidence that he intended to establish diplomatic ties with the papal state during his second term.
But the American political picture has changed since the early 1960s.
As President George W. Bush visits Pope John Paul II on Tuesday, the importance of the Catholic vote is such that no U.S. president visiting Rome would contemplate not making the side trip to the Vatican to see the pope.
At the same time, Washington has become more conscious of the fact that the Roman Catholic Church can exert considerable political clout when it sees fit to do so, and there have been situations when the U.S. government and the Vatican have worked together -- usually secretly.
President Lyndon Johnson personally lobbied Pope Paul VI not to go public with his criticism of the U.S. role in Vietnam, and to rein in dissident, anti-war Catholic clergy. In 1965 they met at the United Nations in New York. In December 1967, Johnson flew to Rome to see the pope in the course of a whirlwind tour of several world capitals. Before that second meeting, Johnson sent the pope a lengthy document explaining why he felt the United States needed to be involved in the Vietnam conflict.
Johnson always felt that his personal approach kept official Vatican opposition in check, but failed to silence the anti-war priests in the United States and elsewhere.
On his visit to the Vatican in June 1982, Ronald Reagan is said to have dozed through Pope John Paul II's opening remarks. "As the pope droned on, Reagan's eyes began to close slightly, and then open," Larry Speakes, Reagan's press secretary, recalled later.
But at that meeting, Reagan and the pope also discussed their mutual determination to defeat the communist empire. According to former Reagan aides, Reagan promised to keep John Paul briefed on U.S. covert support of the anti-regime Solidarity labor movement in Poland, and of any Soviet military moves against his native country.
It was after the Reagan visit that the U.S. government at last established diplomatic relations with the Vatican. It also opened a back channel in the person of Gen. Vernon Walters. A former CIA officer and a prominent Catholic, Walters would from time to time visit John Paul with satellite photos of Soviet troop movements in the vicinity of the Polish border, and other information.
The papal audience has been a fixed point on every U.S. president's itinerary since Eisenhower.
It will also be Bush's second visit, but his first at the Vatican.
Last year, John Paul received Bush at his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo in the Alban Hills outside Rome to avoid anti-American demonstrators in the Italian capital.
George and Laura Bush will be welcomed in the courtyard of St. Damasus on the Vatican Palace grounds, where on patrol will be an honor guard of the papal Swiss Guard in the colorful uniforms that haven't changed in design since the 16th century.
According to papal protocol, Laura Bush will wear black, the required color for married women received in private audience by the pope. Queens and princesses belonging to Catholic royal families, on the other hand, are supposed to wear white.
The president and his wife will be escorted by a flutter of papal officials to the pope's library, where John Paul usually makes a welcoming speech. In his public appearances on his visit to Bulgaria last week, however, the pontiff -- who the Vatican says is "suffering from the symptoms of Parkinson's disease" -- has been so frail that his speeches have had to be read for him.
But the visit also usually includes a private discussion between the pope and the president, with very few officials present.
Vatican sources reached by telephone Monday expected the pope to urge the president to use Washington's influence to hasten the resumption of the Middle East peace process. The pope could also use the occasion to repeat his opposition to embryonic stem cell research.
Bush faces a decision as to whether to provide federal funds for such research, which the church and U.S. conservatives are against because -- they argue -- human embryos are destroyed in the process. Supporters of stem cell research say it could lead to treatments for diabetes and Alzheimer's disease.
The recent sex scandals that have created a seismic upheaval in the U.S. Catholic Church that is not likely to be brought up by either side, the sources said. The Vatican regards the issue as an internal church matter. The Bush administration knows better than to involve itself in the complex clerical scandal.
Not that popes don't sometimes do the unexpected on such occasions.
When John XXIII was due to receive Jacqueline Kennedy a couple of years before her husband's own papal audience, the genial old pontiff -- who spoke no English -- went around all morning rehearsing how to say "Mrs. Kennedy." But when she entered the room, he opened his arms and exclaimed cheerfully, "Jacqueline!"
