During his meeting with Pope Francis last week, President Joe Biden presented the Pontiff with a hand-made fiddleback chasuable, believed to have been worn by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, during a visit to the US in 1936.

The chasuable was stored in the collection of Holy Trinity Church, the Jesuit-run parish that Biden regularly attends.

The gift of a fiddleback chasuable, worn by Pope Pius XII, is ironic because both the vestment and the Pontiff are closely associated with the traditional liturgy that Pope Francis has restricted with Tratitionis Custodes. That irony would probably have been apparent to the Jesuits who offered the chasuable as a gift for the Pope.