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By Christopher Hale
Political philosopher
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The Vatican released the first photograph from Thursday’s audience between Pope Leo XIV and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio just after noon in Rome. Rubio stood at a careful distance from the pope. Neither man looked comfortable.
The readouts followed, and the contrast told the story.
In May 2025, on the eve of Pope Leo’s inauguration, Rubio’s State Department issued a 168-word statement about a visit to Rome that named Ukraine, religious freedom, prisoner exchanges, and the forcibly transferred Ukrainian children. The text thanked the Vatican for its humanitarian role and looked forward to working with the new pope. Today’s State Department readout ran 53 words. It named the Middle East and “topics of mutual interest in the Western Hemisphere.” Nothing else. Rome’s statement was longer. The Holy See’s 120 words spoke of “countries marked by war, by political tensions, and by difficult humanitarian conditions,” and of “the need to work tirelessly in favor of peace.” Only one shared commitment with the United States made the cut: cultivating good bilateral relations. Everything else was an “exchange of views.”
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In Vatican press-office grammar, “exchange of views” is the idiom of disagreement.
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In late February, the weekend Donald Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, Pope Leo called the strikes a scandal for humanity. The denunciations have come almost daily since. His own secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, told Trump bluntly to put an end to the war. From Washington, Cardinal Robert McElroy has called the war not morally legitimate. Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who leads the U.S. military archdiocese, said it was not sponsored by the Lord. Pope Leo himself has demanded the world abolish aerial bombings forever.
Trump and Vice President JD Vance answered with smears. On Monday, the president told radio host Hugh Hewitt that the pope wanted Iran armed with nuclear weapons—a fabrication that runs against sixty years of Vatican teaching against the bomb. Trump claimed Leo’s caution was endangering a lot of Catholics. Parolin rightly described the smear as “a bit strange.” Rubio walked into the Apostolic Palace this morning carrying all of that. Trump chose him over Vance precisely because Rubio is the next highest-ranking Catholic in the Cabinet and presumably more palatable to Leo. The vice president, twice rebuked by two popes, was kept home.
The choice was supposed to repair something. According to the photograph and the readouts, it did the opposite.
Rubio’s mission was to defend a war the pope has called sinful, while representing a president who told a national radio audience this week that the Holy Father endangers Catholics. The Vatican’s senior diplomats had already let Catholic media know the smear was strange.
Whatever Rubio said in the room, the official record runs 53 words. Trump’s war is destroying the MAGA Catholic coalition. Iran is the issue on which MAGA Catholics break from this White House more sharply than on immigration, on tariffs, on Ukraine, on anything else. Catholics who already rejected JD Vance over his treatment of immigrants are now joined by the bishops, by Catholic anti-war organizations that mobilized through Easter, and by the suburban Mass-going voters who carried Michigan and Pennsylvania for Trump in 2024.
None of them want a Catholic elected official putting his name on aerial bombings the pope has demanded the world abolish.
That brings the conversation to 2028.
Rubio is the current fad in MAGA. Vance is wounded among Catholics—rebuked by two popes, flailing on theology, and caught lying to Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York about his own knowledge of immigration policy.
The path to a Republican presidency runs through Catholic-heavy battleground states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and through a Catholic constituency that has not forgotten which side of the Iran War the Vatican took.
Those voters have spent the last 60 days reading bishops’ columns and watching the Holy Father pray at weekly audiences for Iranian children buried under American ordnance. State Department readouts are not what shapes their opinions.
After today, Rubio is no longer carrying Trump’s war. The ownership has passed to him.
Presidential candidates can survive being on the wrong side of a war. Ronald Reagan called Vietnam a noble cause in 1980 and still won the presidency. After voting for Iraq, John McCain went on to lead his party’s national ticket.
However, no Catholic Republican has ever run for president while a sitting pope publicly ruled his administration's war outside Catholic moral teaching, and while another Catholic in that same White House mocked the pope on cable radio. Rubio inherits both at once.
The morning’s icy photograph supplied the visual proof. Behind it lay the State Department’s 53 words on one side and Rome’s 120 on the other—and the verdict belonged unmistakably to Rome.
Marco Rubio came to Rome to defuse a fight with the Vatican. By midday, he had become its public face.
That is what today changed.
Christopher Hale is the publisher of Letters from Leo, a Substack newsletter covering Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic Church, and American politics. He previously served as a Catholic outreach staffer in the Obama White House. Visit thelettersfromleo.com
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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