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WASHINGTON — Ever since Woodrow Wilson, presidents have cozied up to popes. Lyndon Johnson lobbied a pope to back him on Vietnam. Ronald Reagan, once caught dozing during a papal address, talked Cold War tactics with a pope. 

Now it’s President Bush’s turn to court the Vatican. He sees Pope John Paul II on Monday as he contemplates one of the most vexing questions of his presidency: Should the government sponsor promising medical research on stem cells extracted from human embryos? 

The president is still weighing the moral and ethical – and political – ramifications of funding embryonic stem cell research. 

Proponents believe embryonic stem cell research might yield treatments for people suffering with illnesses such as diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. 

Yet Bush knows that deciding to pay for the research would put him at odds with the right wing of his party and the Vatican. The Roman Catholic Church is opposed to this research because human embryos are destroyed in the process. 

“This is an issue that speaks to morality and science,” he said. 

Bush says politics won’t sway his decision, yet the potential for political fallout is great. 

He and Al Gore split the Catholic vote in 2000; Gore got 49 percent to Bush’s 47 percent. Among churchgoing Catholics, Bush got 57 percent to Gore’s 43 percent. 

The president, who has been wooing the Catholic vote since taking office, hasn’t said whether he’ll broach the touchy stem cell issue with the pope. 

If Bush doesn’t bring it up, the pope will, said John White, professor of politics at Catholic University of America. “I have no doubt that this particular pope is going to bring this issue up head on,” White said. 

American presidents didn’t always seek an audience with the pope. 

Woodrow Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower both visited the pope, but generally anti-Catholic sentiment was just strong enough in America that presidents were wary about aligning themselves with the pontiff. John Kennedy, the first Catholic president, ignored that taboo, as has every president since then. 

Johnson decided to visit Pope Paul VI in December 1967, at the end of a three-day whirlwind tour of five nations, because he was worried the pope’s New Year’s Day address would attack the United States and its policy in Vietnam, said Gerald Fogarty at the University of Virginia. Before the meeting, Johnson sent the pope a 10-page memo of his views about the war and his search for peace. 

Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford visited Paul VI too. 

John Paul II, who became pope in October 1978, a year later became the first pontiff to set foot in the White House. Jimmy Carter welcomed him, holding the pope’s cape in place as it fluttered in the fall breeze. 

“This was an important moment as a pious Georgia Baptist welcomed the pope to the White House,” said George Weigel, a papal historian in Washington, who watched the event from the White House lawn. “How far America had come since the 1928 election when there were all these crazy rumors about how the pope was going to run (presidential candidate) Al Smith.” 

That led to the Catholic joke: What was the one-word telegram that Al Smith sent to the pope the day after he lost the election? “Unpack,” Weigel said. 

It was uncomfortably warm in the papal library when an exhausted Reagan visited John Paul II in June 1982. Reagan fully extended diplomatic relations to the Vatican and worked closely with the church to relax the communist grip on eastern Europe and calm U.S.-Soviet tension, though he will be remembered as the president who fell asleep while the pope spoke. 

“As the pope droned on, Reagan’s eyes began to close slightly and then open,” Reagan’s press secretary Larry Speakes recalled later. “Then he nodded a bit and his eyes began to close again.” 

Behind the president, Nancy Reagan shuffled her feet and cleared her throat. To no avail; he needed that nap.