As President Trump meets Pope Francis at the Vatican, a timeline of their history

All eyes will be on the Vatican Wednesday, when President Trump and Pope Francis finally meet face to face.

The pair have had a short but fraught history.

February 2013

Before Donald Trump jumped into the political arena, he was a mere businessman and reality TV star who had a myriad of thoughts on the world around him. When Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was elected to be the next pope of the Catholic Church, Trump tweeted his congratulations: "Congratulations to my Catholic friends on the selection of Pope Francis I to lead the Catholic Church. People that know him love him!"

However, Trump seemed to take a turn for the critical a few days later, when he wondered about the frugality Pope Francis was known for. "I don’t like seeing the Pope standing at the checkout counter (front desk) of a hotel in order to pay his bill," he tweeted. "It’s not Pope-like!"

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December 2013

Still, by the end of the year, he was complimentary: "The new Pope is a humble man, very much like me, which probably explains why I like him so much!"

August 2015

Fast forward to 2015, when Trump declared his candidacy and soon became the frontrunner in the GOP primary. That August, Trump did an interview with CNN, during which he was asked how he would respond if the pope — who was then about to make a visit to the U.S. – told him that capitalism was toxic.

"I'd say, 'ISIS wants to get you,'" Trump replied. "You know that ISIS wants to go in and take over the Vatican? You have heard that. You know, that's a dream of theirs, to go into Italy."

He then said that he liked the pope: "He's becoming very political, there's no question about it. But I like him. He seems like a pretty good guy."

September 2015

When Pope Francis spoke before Congress in September, making a plea for welcoming migrants, it was seen as a rebuke on people who were promoting anti-immigration stances — including Trump. Francis, who was born in Argentina to Italian immigrants, urged Congress to allow immigrants into the "land of dreams" and implored them to reject "a mindset of hostility."

February 2016

In February, during the heat of the campaign, Trump once again said the pope was acting "political." But this time around, he didn't seem to be a fan of it.

"So I think that the pope is a very political person. I think that he doesn’t understand the problems our country has. I don’t think he understands the danger of the open border that we have with Mexico," he said in an interview with Fox Business.

A week later, the pope suggested that Trump "is not a Christian", amid the Republican's calls for deporting immigrants and building a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border. "A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian," he told journalists. "This is not the gospel."

Trump wrote a fiery reply on Facebook: "If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened. ISIS would have been eradicated unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians."

He dialed it back just hours later, telling CNN's Anderson Cooper that he doesn't like fighting with the pope. "I like his personality. I like what he represents," Trump said.

November 2016

Days before the U.S. presidential election, Pope Francis again spoke out against the building of walls during an event at the Vatican: “No tyranny can be sustained without exploiting our fears. This is clear. All tyranny is terrorist. And when that terror ignited in the peripheries with massacres, looting, oppression, and injustice explodes in the centers in the form of violence, including with hateful and cowardly intent, the citizens who still have some rights are tempted by the false security of walls, physical or social—walls that close some in and banish others."

After Trump won the election, the pope said in an interview, "I do not give judgements on people or politicians, I simply want to understand what are the sufferings that their approach causes to the poor and the excluded."

April 2017

Trump's team said it was planning to reach out to the Vatican about a potential meeting between Trump and the pope. "We would be honored to have an audience with his holiness," Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said.

May 2017

A visit to the Vatican was finalized as part of Trump's first trip abroad as president.

Despite Pope Francis's criticism of anti-immigration policies, he told reporters that he won't try to soften Trump's immigration stance and will try to find common ground with the president.

"I never make a judgment about a person without hearing him out," the pope said.

The two met on May 24 and had a private exchange. Afterward, Trump called it an "honor of a lifetime" to have met the pope.

"I leave the Vatican more determined than ever to pursue PEACE in our world," he tweeted.