Secretary of State Marco Rubio kicked off a two-day visit to Vatican City and Italy Thursday by meeting Pope Leo XIV, his second audience with the American-born pontiff in less than a year.
Rubio, a practicing Catholic, was escorted into the Apostolic Palace by the Swiss Guard – donning their Renaissance-style, tricolor uniforms – and met separately with Leo and Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin during a visit that lasted approximately two and a half hours.
“Good to see you,” the secretary of state said as he walked into the palace’s library and shook the pontiff’s hand. “It was almost a year that I was here with you.”
The soft-spoken pope noted the get-together was “ten days off” from last year’s meeting, when Rubio and fellow Catholic, Vice President JD Vance, traveled to the Vatican following Leo’s inauguration Mass.
While the visit came days after President Trump claimed the pontiff was “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people” by opposing the war in Iran – the pope looked happy to see Rubio, who brought along his wife, Jeanette, and one of their daughters. Both women wore modest black clothing and lace veils on the top of their heads, as is traditional protocol for a private audience with the pope.
The two leaders smiled as they exchanged gifts, with Rubio giving the pope a small crystal football paperweight bearing the State Department seal.
The top US diplomat, whose wife is a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader, played a year of college football at Tarkio College in Missouri. His son, Anthony Rubio, is a running back for the Florida Gators.
“What to get someone who has everything?” the secretary joked as he gave Leo the paperweight, adding to the pope that he knew “you’re a baseball guy” in a nod to the Illinois native’s Chicago White Sox fandom.
Leo, for his part, gave Rubio a pen apparently made of olive wood — “olive being, of course, the plant of peace,” he said — with his coat of arms on it and a picture book of Vatican artworks.
US Ambassador to the Holy See Brian Burch, the co-founder of the conservative political advocacy group CatholicVote, and the US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor were also in the meeting.
Rubio met separately with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, and Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican foreign minister, after his audience with Leo.
The Cuban-American secretary of state was heard speaking Spanish with Parolin, a former Vatican ambassador in Venezuela, during their meeting.
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“Let me put it back in here so I don’t lose it,” Rubio joked, in Spanish, after Parolin gifted him what appeared to be a key chain in an elegant box.
Parolin was heard chatting with Rubio about his “four sons.”
In total, the secretary spent some two and a half hours in the Apostolic Palace.
The Vatican described talks as “cordial” and said that during Rubio’s meetings with both Leo and Parolin, “the shared commitment to fostering good bilateral relations between the Holy See and the United States of America was reaffirmed.”
It added the two sides exchanged views on current events “with particular attention to countries marked by war, political tensions, and difficult humanitarian situations, as well as on the need to work tirelessly in favor of peace.”
State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said Rubio and the pope discussed the situation in the Middle East “and topics of mutual interest in the Western Hemisphere. The meeting underscored the strong relationship between the United States and the Holy See and their shared commitment to promoting peace and human dignity.”
In a separate statement about the Parolin meeting, Pigott said the two diplomats discussed “ongoing humanitarian efforts in the Western Hemisphere and efforts to achieve a durable peace in the Middle East. The discussion reflected the enduring partnership between the United States and the Holy See in advancing religious freedom.”
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