Presidents begin their terms with great attention paid to what will be done on “Day One” or during the first 100 days. But the end of their terms also tells a story.

The “interregnum” between the election and the inauguration of the next president can be a fraught time. In recent decades, the new president is usually of a different party than the incumbent, meaning that the outgoing chief executive has been in part rejected. How he handles that in the last months in office is thus an important signal.

President Joe Biden decided to take his last foreign trip in the final fortnight of his presidency, traveling to Rome to meet Pope Francis. The meeting was scheduled for Friday but was canceled on Wednesday night due to the California wildfires and Biden’s decision to remain at home to attend to the federal response.

Nevertheless, the choice to visit the Pope was significant. The ostensible reason was to discuss prospects for peace, but the choice of farewell by a president is more about the symbolism than the substance. What did President Biden wish to highlight in his choice to meet Pope Francis?

Consider how Biden’s predecessors chose carefully where they went in their final days, or who they received.

President Jimmy Carter, laid to rest this week at age 100, welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Washington after losing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, but before leaving the White House. Begin, along with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, signed the Camp David Accords, the greatest diplomatic achievement of the Carter administration. His visit between the election and the end of Carter’s term highlighted that.

President Reagan had a different — and nearly unique — valedictory. He had won two landslide victories, and his own vice president was elected to succeed him. Into that celebratory environment, Reagan welcomed his staunch ally, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, to Washington for a state dinner in November 1988. The same month he welcomed West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, highlighting again his “peace through strength” policy in Europe. In December, he met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in New York, with whom he had concluded the nuclear-arms-control treaties that he had proposed at the beginning of his first term.

President George H.W. Bush was, like Carter, a one-term president. He continued his diplomatic activity to the end, taking a trip to Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Russia as the new year 1993 arrived. The Saudi trip drew attention to Bush’s coalition to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and to protect the Saudi kingdom. Bush had sent troops to Somalia, and in Moscow he signed a nuclear-arms-reduction treaty, a consequence of his presiding over the end of the Cold War.

Bush the Elder invited Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to spend a few days at Camp David in the last week of his presidency, a testament to their friendship and joint work on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

By the time President Bill Clinton ended his second term in 2000, the annual APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit meeting took place every November, so now American presidents have that customary engagement on their post-election calendar. Clinton went to Brunei in 2000; Biden went to Brazil last November.

But the signature trip of the interregnum was Clinton’s visit to Ireland and Great Britain, wishing to emphasize his work on the 1998 Good Friday agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland.

President George W. Bush undertook the most remarkable interregnum trip, visiting two war zones. He visited the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as he prepared to leave office after two terms. The aftermath of 9/11 and the war on terror were the principal challenges of Bush’s term, and so in December 2008, he visited the troops he had sent into battle. Bush was making a case for his decisions before the court of history.

Succeeding Bush, President Barack Obama was unusual in not using the last months of his second term for any symbolic or significant travel, and President Donald Trump left office after the 2020 election in circumstances that were not conducive to foreign diplomacy, either through trips abroad or hosting visitors at home.

Understood against that backdrop, what did President Biden wish to indicate with his planned visit to Pope Francis?

Biden has always expressed pride in his Catholic faith and was one of the few presidents in history to make a priority of attending church every week — even when traveling abroad. Over many decades, Biden has been in that minority of Catholics who strive to observe the Sunday obligation to attend Mass.

At the same time, he has clashed with Catholic prelates over his policies on abortion and transgender ideology, topics on which Pope Francis has spoken with great intensity. As president, Biden has made both abortion access and transgender mandates central to his policies and his (abandoned) re-election campaign.

In visiting the Holy Father, Biden likely wished to defend his own record as a Catholic in public office for more than 50 years — and to have an implied papal approval for the same. While there would have been no question of the Holy Father minimizing Catholic teaching on abortion or transgender issues, the warm photos of Pope Francis and Biden together would have been used to send a friendlier message.

The desire for that friendly encounter was likely motivated by a certain concern. Biden well knows that within the U.S. Catholic hierarchy, as well as the vibrant parts of American Catholicism — consider the SEEK conference last week in Utah, or the 25th anniversary this year of Word on Fire — he has lost the argument for a Catholic socially liberal politics. Even on the political front, Catholic voters — usually slightly favorable to Democratic presidential candidates — voted by a large margin for Trump last November. The decision to visit the Vatican was likely Biden’s attempt to appeal to authority to bolster a weakening position.

Biden’s exit also marks something of an end to the long dispute about pro-abortion Catholic politicians.

Biden’s unusually faithful Mass attendance meant that the clash between his Catholic faith and politics drew greater attention. There are plenty of other pro-abortion Catholic politicians but — with the exception of Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi — they are not known for regularly going to Mass. The issue, for example, of the reception of Holy Communion does not practically apply to those who never go to Mass.

The generation to which Biden belonged — Edward Kennedy prominent among them, along with Pelosi — cared what Catholic leaders said about them. The generation that followed them largely does not.

That entire issue will diminish under President Trump, who is not Catholic and rarely goes to church. The new vice president, JD Vance, is a recent convert to Catholicism but has largely followed Trump’s shifts in a pro-choice direction.

Biden’s visit to Pope Francis would have been considered a visit to an ally. They are aligned on immigration policy and climate change and, more broadly, on a progressive/liberal approach to politics that does have roots in Catholic social teaching, especially regarding poverty and inequality.

The visit would have been something of a boost for the Holy Father, too. Coming the day after his “state of the world” address to the diplomatic corps, Pope Francis would have had the prestige of an outgoing American president choosing him for a final meeting.

The foreign policy of Pope Francis has met with significant setbacks — in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ukraine, China and Israel/Gaza. Even in Europe, the Holy Father’s immigration positions have been rejected. Hosting a friendly American president would have been a welcome respite from turmoil on the foreign-policy front.

President Biden, 82, is the oldest man ever to serve as president. Pope Francis, 88, is already the fourth-oldest man ever to be pope. There would have been a personal, not only professional, dimension to the meeting — two leaders in the evening of life looking back together.

But as often happens in the affairs of state, events — in this case, the wildfires consuming Los Angeles — intervened.