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On Thursday, Marco Rubio will walk into the Apostolic Palace and face Pope Leo XIV.
JD Vance will be at home in Washington — sidelined from the administration’s first cabinet-level audience with the pope since Trump publicly broke with him over the Iran war.
It is a remarkable snub. Vance is the highest-ranking Catholic in the federal government, the vice president of the United States, the man who flew to Rome last year with Rubio to embrace the new American pope.
That tells you how badly the rift inside this administration has fractured.
Vance has spent the last few weeks at war with the pope. As tensions flared between the Vatican and the Trump White House over migration and the Iran war, Vance’s allies falsely suggested that the Vatican was coordinating with American journalists and operatives to wound the vice president.
From the chaplaincy of the U.S. armed forces, the military archbishop declared the Iran war unjust. The Vatican’s own secretary of state told Trump directly to put an end to it. Pope Leo XIV himself called for aerial bombing to be banned forever.
Through all of it, Vance kept attacking. He has now been rebuked by two popes, and his response was to publish a book about finding God.
So Trump sent Rubio.
It is not a rescue.
The Iran war is now Marco Rubio’s war. He was its loudest cabinet champion in the months before the bombs fell, and as civilian deaths climb and gasoline prices stay at record highs, his face has become its public marker. Last night, while a war he championed grinds into another month with no end in sight, Rubio was at a Washington party.
The optics — the secretary of state celebrating while the casualty count climbs — are the kind that ruin political careers.
Tucker Carlson, in a weekend interview with the New York Times, described the architecture of the rift with unusual candor:
There are people in the White House who want to hurt JD Vance and have wanted that since the very first day. They were bitter. They wanted Marco Rubio to be the choice as vice president. And so JD has been subject to — this is well known, but I’ll just confirm it — nonstop treachery from people on the neoconservative side.
Carlson said something else worth noting: the war will destroy the political career of anyone who promotes it. Marco Rubio is the test case — and he is walking into the Vatican on Thursday.
Both Catholics in the upper reaches of this administration made the pilgrimage to Pope Leo XIV in Rome last year — JD Vance and Marco Rubio. The invitation this time went only to Rubio.
Both men have their names penciled in on the Republican primary calendar for 2028, and the choice to send one and not the other is a public marker that the West Wing sees the vice president as too wounded by his war with the pope to be allowed near the pope himself.
Pope Leo XIV is no politician. He has no horse in the 2028 race, no quiet alliance with American reporters to wound the White House, no campaign to humiliate Catholic Republicans. What he is doing is what every pope before him has done when his nation’s leaders march toward war: he is reiterating the unbroken teaching of the Catholic Church.
That teaching is not new. The Catechism is plain on the gravity of war. The Second Vatican Council called the bombing of cities “a crime against God and man.” John Paul II spent the first months of 2003 begging George W. Bush not to invade Iraq. Pope Leo XIV stands inside that tradition and speaks from inside it. His objection to Trump’s Iran war is the consistent moral witness of the Catholic Church across centuries.
Marco Rubio will arrive at the Apostolic Palace on Thursday carrying a war that the Catholic Church has called illegal, immoral, and unjust — a war whose victims include the Iranian schoolchildren whose parents have written directly to Pope Leo XIV.
Across from him will sit a pope who has spent more than two months demanding a ceasefire and who recently called for aerial bombing to be abolished forever. The administration sent him hoping for warmth; what the Holy Father will offer is the Gospel.
The administration sent him because Vance was too damaged to go. Both men will leave this episode worse off than they began. The Iran war is becoming a millstone around the neck of every official who promotes it, and the man in the white cassock will not bless the weight.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV — and with the millions of American Catholics who refuse to baptize a war the Holy See has called illegal, immoral, and unjust.
We have no patience, either, for the cynical politics that treat the Vicar of Christ as a campaign prop and the bombing of Iranian children as a foreign-policy talking point.
In an era poisoned by cruelty and ambition, we remain rooted in a faith that will not flinch before a war machine and will not bow to the idols of empire and political revenge.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than partisan grandstanding and proxy warfare.
They are looking for courage, for truth, for love made visible — and right now, as the secretary of state walks into the Vatican carrying a war that has cost lives, jobs, and the moral standing of the United States, that hunger has never been more urgent.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a White House that has declared war on the pope and the peace he preaches — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.