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.