In a whirlwind trip planned for September, Pope Francis is likely to meet world leaders in New York as well as President Obama and congressional leaders in Washington.
Other popes have addressed the United Nations, but an address to a joint session of Congress would be a historic first.
Francis tends to ruffle feathers during his trips and interviews.
On Monday, speaking to reporters in typically freewheeling style on the papal flight to Rome from a weeklong visit to Asia, said Catholic couples don’t have to breed “like rabbits” and can morally practice “responsible parenting.”
However, as seems to be his wont, Francis also rebuked progressives inside and outside the church by reiterating the teaching against contraception as always immoral and by warning against “ideological colonization” of the Third World by wealthy nations that condition assistance on accepting their societies’ dominant views on birth control and sexuality.
“When imposed conditions come from imperial colonizers, they search to make people lose their own identity and make a sameness,” Francis said of aid groups and lending institutions that demand that they be allowed to distribute condoms or threaten to withdraw aid because of laws against gays.
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“This is ideological colonization,” Francis said.
The pope, an Argentine who has never visited the U.S., said he planned to visit Washington and New York City as part of his trip to the World Meeting of Families, which is scheduled for September in Philadelphia.
Specifically, Francis said he would like to perform the canonization ceremony for Blessed Junipero Serra at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in the District.
According to Catholic News Service, Francis called Washington a fitting location for the ceremony for Blessed Junipero, an 18th-century Franciscan cleric who founded the mission work in California, because a statue of him stands in the U.S. Capitol.
The Catholic News Service and Catholic News Agency noted that the Vatican has yet to formally approve the U.S. plans.
The tentative schedule, which has been submitted to the Vatican by U.S. church officials and U.N. representatives, would have the pope arriving in Washington late Sept. 22.
On Sept. 23, Francis would visit the White House for an official welcoming ceremony, then celebrate Mass at the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
On Sept. 24, the pontiff would take the unprecedented step of addressing a joint session of Congress. When Francis said he would be at the long-scheduled Philadelphia gathering, House Speaker John A. Boehner issued him an invitation to speak to Congress.
He would deliver remarks to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 25.
The only dates that are locked down are Sept. 26 and 27, when the World Meeting of Families is scheduled.
When family issues were discussed on the flight Monday, Francis was typically blunt. He warned against same-sex marriage as one of many “insidious attacks” on the family and defended the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae by noting that “openness to life is a condition of the sacrament of matrimony.”
But in a formulation that borrows from anti-Catholic polemics about large families, he said Catholicism does not mean “you have to be like rabbits.” He noted that church teaching includes the responsibility to regulate the spacing of children through such methods as natural family planning.
According to reporters on the plane, he cited the case of a woman he met who was pregnant with her eighth child after seven cesarean sections.
“That is an irresponsibility,” he said.
Although the woman might argue that she should trust in God, he said, “God gives you methods to be responsible.”
Alan Holdren and Elise Harris, reporting for Catholic News Agency, said Archbishop Bernardito Auza, a member of the organizing committee for Francis’ September visit, revealed details of the proposed three-city schedule in Manila on Jan. 18.
The pontiff “would arrive on the 22nd and he would leave the evening of the 27th. It’s really a full six days, plus the travel, so it’s really one week,” Archbishop Auza told CNA/EWTN News.
The Mass in Washington would be primarily for bishops, consecrated and religious-order men and women, seminarians and representatives from humanitarian and Catholic charitable organizations, the archbishop said.
“And we might say really the highlight of the Washington visit might be his speech to the joint-meeting of Congress, so the Senate and the House of Representatives,” Archbishop Auza added.
The U.N. General Assembly would be the pontiff’s destination on the morning of Sept. 25, which is also the opening of the three-day Post-2015 Sustainable Development Summit.
“Practically all of the heads of states and governments will be around and they will all be there on that day, so if the pope were to finalize this visit to the U.S. that means that he would address all the heads of states and of governments, who will be sitting with their official delegations,” the archbishop said.
Francis will “of course” visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan but may celebrate Mass in a larger venue such as Madison Square Garden, Archbishop Auza said. The plan is not to have a huge Mass outside of Philadelphia, as “the focus will really be Philadelphia” and the World Meeting of Families, he said.
Other possibilities for New York are to have an interethnic meeting with the pope and a visit to the site of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Archbishop Auza said.
“But these are just proposals. At the end of February, there will be the first organizational visit [from a Vatican delegation], and then we will see what we could really fill in,” the archbishop said.
Papal visits to the U.S. were once rare but now are relatively routine.
Blessed Paul VI made a 1965 visit to the United Nations that also included such America-specific stopovers as a Yankee Stadium Mass.
He made the trip after a century in which popes hardly left Rome — and never left Italy — because of tensions with the young Italian state.
Setting aside the 33-day reign of Pope John Paul I, every pope since Paul has visited the U.S.
Including one-day stopovers, St. John Paul II visited seven times and twice addressed the United Nations, in 1979 and 1995. Pope Benedict XVI’s 2008 trip included a speech to the United Nations and a Washington stopover, including a White House visit and Mass at the newly opened Nationals Park.
On Monday, Francis outlined some of his other travel plans for the year. He said he hopes to make a three-nation South American trip, adding Ecuador and Paraguay to an itinerary that already includes a Bolivian visit. Francis also expressed hope for a late-year African trip with possible stops in Uganda and the Central African Republic.
The Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, stressed that the travel plans were “provisional and that nothing has been decided.”
Francis shot down one widely floated idea. Although it would be a “beautiful thing” to enter the U.S. via the Mexican border as “a sign of brotherhood and of help to the immigrants,” he said, the length of the visit and protocol would make that impossible.
“But you know that going to Mexico without going to visit the Madonna [of Guadalupe] would be a drama. A war could break out,” the Argentine pope said to laughter.
• Cheryl Wetzstein can be reached at cwetzstein@washingtontimes.com.
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