ROME — Secretary of State Marco Rubio is slated to travel to Italy to meet with Pope Leo XIV this week, according to a senior Vatican official, marking the first high-ranking encounter between the pontiff and a top administration official since President Donald Trump issued withering criticism of the Chicago-born pope last month.
The visit comes amid a deterioration in relations between the United States and the Vatican, as well as Italy, with observers viewing the trip as an attempt to patch up troubled ties. Rubio, a prominent Catholic in the administration, is expected to meet with Leo on Thursday, according to the Vatican official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a meeting that has not yet been made public.
Italian press reports suggest Rubio may also meet with senior Italian officials after a rupture in the formerly warm relationship between Trump and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. She had cultivated one of the best relationships with Trump of any European leader but has emerged as a critic of the Iran war, and she has additionally chided Trump for attacking the pope. Meloni’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.
Trump, for his part, turned on Meloni last month, telling the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that “I thought she had courage, but I was wrong.” On Thursday, Trump threatened to withdraw troops from Italy, as well as Spain, after both countries denied the use of their bases to the United States for operations related to the war in Iran.
Trump last month took aim at Leo, labeling him “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy,” comments that divided conservative Catholics and brought a flurry of rebukes. Trump additionally suggested that Leo, the first U.S.-born pope, had only been selected by the conclave last year as a counterbalance to the U.S. leader.
“He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald Trump,” Trump wrote in a social media post. “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”
Leo has gradually escalated his strong opposition to the war in Iran, emerging as sharper and more outspoken than at any point of his papacy. He has also specifically denounced attempts to invoke God’s name to back the war.
God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” Leo said on Palm Sunday. He quoted Isaiah 1:15, saying, “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen — your hands are full of blood.”
Shortly after Trump made his comments, Leo told reporters that he has “no fear of the Trump administration.” He later made a series of speeches during his trip to Africa in which he decried “tyrants” who fund wars. Leo, however, later sought to lower the temperature, saying those comments were not aimed at Trump.
Leo’s top allies in the U.S. Catholic Church have delivered even more pointed critiques of the administration while also noting how the pope has become more vocal.
“He has come to be more specific,” Washington Archbishop Robert McElroy said last week during a panel discussion at Villanova University. “I think that’s a real a conversion of how he has come to understand his office, and the need for it to be truly prophetic at certain moments. He began with statements that were more general and then became more specific. Then applied to the war itself.”
“I think that’s a level of prophecy we need in the life of the church but we need in our world. There is no prophetic moral voice in the world at this time — other than Pope Leo.”
Last month, revelations also emerged of an unusual and tense meeting at the Pentagon in which a top Vatican diplomat, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, then the Holy See’s ambassador to the United States, was summoned for what turned into a frank discussion on policy issues.
The meeting between Leo and Rubio is set to be their second since the Chicagoan’s election last year. A day after the pope’s Inauguration Mass last May, Rubio joined Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, for a private audience at the Vatican.
Marco Politi, an author and longtime Vatican watcher, called Rubio’s upcoming trip a recognition by the administration that Trump’s decision to directly attack the pope was harming Republican prospects ahead of key midterm elections this fall.
“Conservative Catholic voters don’t like to see the pope attacked in a rude and coarse way by the administration,” Politi said. “But one way or another, the confrontation will go on because Leo has become internationally the symbol of antagonism to a policy based on the threat or brutal use of weapons.”
Michelle Boorstein in Washington contributed to this report.
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