Rubio Heads To Rome To Make Peace With The Pope

WASHINGTON—Secretary of State Marco Rubio will head to Rome this week to smooth things over with the Vatican amidst tensions between the United States and Pope Leo over the Holy Father’s criticisms of Operation Epic Fury.

Rubio’s visit to Italy will take place from Wednesday, May 6, to Friday, May 8, and is formally intended to “advance bilateral relations with Italy and the Vatican,” the State Department said on Monday, noting that Rubio will “meet with Holy See leadership to discuss the situation in the Middle East and mutual interests in the Western Hemisphere.” The Holy See says Rubio will meet privately with Pope Leo, who is the first pope from the United States. He will also meet with Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state.

The meeting comes amid high tensions between the White House and Pope Leo, who has repeatedly criticized President Donald Trump’s administration. The president has aggressively hit back at the pope, even suggesting that the Vatican chose him as a response to Trump’s presidency — and that “they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.”

“If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican,” the president said in a fiery Truth Social post. Trump’s sentiment that Pope Leo was chosen to meet the second Trump administration, though generally considered to have been articulated too aggressively towards the head of the Catholic Church, is also widely held to be true.

The most recent bump in the road came in the form of Pope Leo’s appointment of a bishop to West Virginia: that bishop, according to the Washington Post, was illegally smuggled into the United States in the trunk of a car and has been vocal in his criticisms of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Things took a more hopeful turn of events when the pope downplayed reporter suggestions that he was warring with Trump, saying in late April that the “narrative that has not been accurate in all of its aspects” and that it was “not in my interest at all” to argue with Trump.

Vice President Vance took another step towards reconciliation with a social media post that praised the pope for his words: “I am grateful to Pope Leo for saying this. While the media narrative constantly gins up conflict — and yes, real disagreements have happened and will happen — the reality is often much more complicated.”

“Pope Leo preaches the gospel, as he should, and that will inevitably mean he offers his opinions on the moral issues of the day,” Vance added. “The President — and the entire administration — work to apply those moral principles in a messy world. He will be in our prayers, and I hope that we’ll be in his.”

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, doesn’t see it that way. Rubio’s meeting with the pope is just one “productive” step in what will hopefully be the healing of the relationship between the Holy Father and the White House, he suggested.

“I think ultimately it needs to be 3 people, but it’s very good that the Secretary of State is going,” he shared in a phone interview with The Daily Wire. Roberts, also a Catholic, stressed that the most important part of the dynamic is that Pope Leo and President Donald Trump meet and spend time together, “especially considering they’re both great leaders and great Americans.”

“In the meantime, I think the greatest tag team, for the conservative movement internationally, is Vice President Vance and Secretary Rubio,” he said. “So, no doubt, Rubio will have a great productive congenial visit with the Holy Father, and no doubt, at some point, the vice president will visit the Holy Father again, and no doubt, at some point, the president and Holy Father will visit again.”

Tensions escalated in early April when the Free Press published an “exposé” describing a reportedly contentious January meeting between a Vatican diplomat and Pentagon officials. The report, citing unnamed sources, claimed that the Pentagon’s Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, then the Vatican’s Apostolic Nuncio, chastised him and insisted the United States “has the military power to do whatever it wants — and that the Church had better take its side.”

Notably, the story claimed that Colby invoked the Avignon Papacy, a period in the 14th century in which the Holy See moved from Rome to France, where a series of popes were largely bent to the will of the French monarchy. It also cast Colby as belonging to “a cadre of Catholic and ostensibly dovish officials” allied with Vice President JD Vance, who are “struggling to reconcile their isolationist instincts with the aggressive posture of a president who, within a single year, has bombed eight countries — with no sign of stopping.”

Allies of the vice president and some conservative commentators took the story as a sign that Vance’s critics sought to ostracize Vance from Catholicism, just war, and Pope Leo himself. The Vatican, the Pentagon, and the American Ambassador to the Holy See all denied the Free Press report, saying it was cordial and respectful.

Michael Caputo, a longtime Catholic and advisor to President Donald Trump, reflected that both Vance and Rubio bring a different flavor of Catholicism to the table. Vance, a new convert, brings fresh perspective and evangelical zeal. Rubio was baptized Catholic as a baby, spent a few years in the LDS church in Las Vegas as a child, and returned to the Catholic Church by his early teens.

Caputo stumbled on Rubio’s memoir “American Son” during a particularly dark period when he was being targeted by the Biden DOJ, and he was incredibly impressed by Rubio’s reverence for the Catholic sacraments. That one specific chapter of “American Son” “drew me into my faith as Russia gate sucked my family in,” he shared.

“Marco and JD are two very different Catholics and Catholicism needs them both,” said Caputo. But he argued that it is “Marco Rubio’s deep and binding understanding of the sacraments and the role they played in connecting people to Christ” that “will make a difference as he comes to the Vatican.”

Rubio has cautioned respect for the Vatican, encouraging the public to see the office not as political but as spiritual.

“I understand there’s this temptation to cover the papacy as a political office,” Rubio told reporters in May 2025 of the pope. “It is not a political office. It is a spiritual office, and it is one that – it has social teachings that are aligned with the faith and with the gospel.”

But he has also been unafraid to point out when the Vatican’s public posture on issues like immigration does not match its own actions.

“I don’t mean this to be snarky, but the Vatican has rules about who can come in and who can stay,” he noted that same day. “So every place has that. It’s just — it’s what you do to protect your sovereignty.”

Rubio was also formerly the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere and has spent much of his career focused on that hemisphere — as has Pope Leo. Though the pope is from Chicago, he has been heavily focused on Latin America.

That means there is a “common language between the two men,” Caputo stressed, “a deep and abiding concern for the hemisphere,” a granular level of understanding of the region, and it makes Rubio the right guy for Pope Leo to be talking to.

The pope has repeatedly condemned the war with Iran, saying in late April aboard a flight back to Rome, “As a pastor, I cannot be in favor of war,” and “I would like to encourage everyone to make efforts to look for answers that come from a culture of peace and not from a place of hate and division.”

His previous remarks on the war in Iran prompted President Donald Trump to publicly scold him and accuse him of being “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”

“I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” Trump said. “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country. And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.”

“I have no intention of getting into a debate,” Leo said in response in late April.

Catholics in the U.S. are also sensitive to the fact that the pope has said he has no plans to return to the United States to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary.

“He has as much work to do as our friends who are public officials in the United States, in fact, I would strongly encourage him as a Roman Catholic and as an American, to visit the United States, his native country during America 250,” Roberts told The Daily Wire. “A lot of us conservative Catholics are slighted that the 1st American pope doesn’t have any plans to visit us this year.”