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Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s closely watched meeting with Pope Leo XIV on Thursday served as a valuable cooldown after weeks of rising tensions between the Vatican and the White House.
It’s also sparked more speculation about Rubio’s potential presidential ambitions.
While filling in at the White House briefing room earlier this week, Rubio denied that his Vatican City visit was intended to ease the friction created by President Donald Trump’s repeated criticism of the pope over the war in Iran. The rest of his briefing performance won widespread praise within the administration and among Trump allies. His team even cut one answer, in which Rubio described his hope for America, into a campaign-style viral video.
That halo followed Rubio overseas this week; many inside and close to the administration saw the timing of his trip as beneficial, given Trump’s broadsides at the pope.
Vice President JD Vance — who advised the pope to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology” after Leo criticized the war — is a Catholic convert who’s publishing a book about his faith next month. But Rubio was baptized a Catholic; his family briefly joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when he was young, but he returned to Catholicism as a teenager.
That background, for some Trump allies, made him uniquely qualified to affirm what a State Department spokesman called “the strong relationship” between the US and the Holy See.“Secretary Rubio may be the best person for the president to send, because he’s written about his devotion to the Catholic sacraments, and that’s a high priority for the Vatican in this era. But at the same time, the secretary has more common interests with the pope in Western Hemisphere affairs, a topic deeply important to both men,” said Michael Caputo, a longtime former Trump adviser who studies Catholic theology at Ave Maria University.
Vance remains the frontrunner for the GOP’s 2028 nomination, but Rubio’s star is rising as chatter about 2028 continues to grow within the party. Many Trump aides still privately predict that the most likely scenario would see Rubio as Vance’s running mate — even as a few wonder who would be the better candidate.“The secretary has made it clear that he supports the vice president if [Vance] chooses to run in 2028,” Caputo said, predicting that the papal visit will “show us Marco Rubio will make a great vice president.”
During his press briefing earlier in the week, Rubio offered up a preview of how he’d approach the much-anticipated meeting. He took a far more neutral tone toward the Catholic leader than Trump, who had accused Leo of “endangering Catholics” with his stance on the Iran war, and avoided weighing in on Trump’s dynamic with the pope, as Vance had.
“I think what the president basically said is that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon because they would use it against places that have a lot of Catholics, and Christians, and others for that matter,” Rubio told reporters when asked about Trump’s rhetoric toward Leo.
Trump had posted on Truth Social that “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” a sentiment Leo has never conveyed.
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Rubio, who holds a unique dual role as Trump’s national security adviser, also said this week that he and the pope would discuss humanitarian aid for Cuba and religious freedom issues. State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said after the meeting that the two touched on “the situation in the Middle East and topics of mutual interest in the Western Hemisphere.”
Though Rubio said this week that his trip to the Vatican had been in the works before Trump tangled with the pope over Iran, the timing proved auspicious, given new polling that showed 61% of American Catholics with a negative view of Trump’s comments about the pope and Iran’s nuclear capability. Trump won a majority of the Catholic vote in 2024.
And before Rubio left Washington — with a delegation that included his wife and US ambassador to India Sergio Gor — he had company in trying to downplay the depth of the tensions between Trump and Leo. US Ambassador to the Holy See Brian Burch told reporters this week that he doesn’t “accept the idea that somehow there’s some deep rift.”
Burch cofounded CatholicVote, a conservative Catholic advocacy organization, before joining the Trump administration; the current president of CatholicVote, Kelsey Reinhardt, echoed that sentiment after the Rubio-Leo meeting.
“The warmth between them was not surprising,” she said, noting that Rubio “has consistently shown respect for the papal office.”
“The meeting should be understood less as a photo opportunity and more as evidence that, even amid tensions or disagreements, the US-Holy See relationship remains serious, active, and consequential,” Reinhardt added.
Shelby’s view
By all accounts, Rubio’s meeting with the pope appears to have been successful: In addition to a sitdown with Leo, he met with the Vatican’s secretary of state and spent roughly two-and-a-half hours at the enclave. Combine that with his White House press briefing, and it’s clear in conversations I’ve had that the administration remains extremely happy with him.
But talk of 2028 remains premature — most White House aides are still confident that the Republican nomination is Vance’s, should he want it. And Rubio’s diplomacy with the pope could fade, should Trump take to Truth Social later this week with more criticisms.
Notable
- The Wall Street Journal reported on the 2028 buzz stoked by Rubio’s press briefing appearances.