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Tomorrow morning at the Apostolic Palace, Marco Rubio will sit across from Pope Leo XIV. The audience falls twenty-four hours before the one-year anniversary of Robert Prevost’s election as the first American pope. It comes after weeks of attacks on Leo by the man who sent Rubio to Rome.
Two developments on Wednesday made the secretary of state’s mission considerably harder than when he boarded his plane in Washington.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin spoke to reporters outside the Patristic Institute Augustinianum in Rome on Wednesday evening. The Vatican secretary of state and senior diplomat of the Catholic Church was asked about Donald Trump’s repeated public attacks on Pope Leo XIV — a campaign that began on April 13, the day the pope departed for Africa, and has continued through this week.
“To attack him in this way or to reproach what he does seems a bit strange to me,” Parolin said.
Then he opened a door. Asked whether the Holy Father would take a phone call from the president of the United States, Parolin replied that the pope is “open to all options” and “has never held back in the face of anyone.” If Trump requested direct dialogue with Leo, Parolin said, “I imagine that he would have no difficulty in accepting it.”
That offer is striking when you consider what it implies.
A year after Leo’s election, Donald Trump remains one of the only major world leaders on earth who has not so much as picked up the phone to congratulate the new pope. Almost every G7 head of state had reached out to the Vatican. Even Vladimir Putin made the call within days of the conclave.
However, the president of the United States — leader of the country where Robert Prevost was born and ordained — has stayed silent for twelve months.
Trump himself supplied the other piece. When a reporter asked what message Rubio should deliver to the pope on Thursday, the president returned to his Iran charge and stood by it without qualification.
“Whether I make him happy or I don’t make him happy, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. And he seemed to be saying that they can. And I say they cannot.”
That claim is false. Pope Leo XIV has never said Iran should be permitted to develop nuclear weapons. No pope in living memory has said anything of the kind. Parolin made the point explicit on Wednesday, calling Trump’s claim “not a correct statement” and noting that the Holy See “has always worked, continues to work precisely on nuclear disarmament.”
But the lie has a purpose. Trump is preparing the ground to dismiss whatever the pope says on Iran, on Gaza, on Cuba, on migration, on the death penalty, by casting Leo as a fellow traveler with theocratic regimes.
This is the diplomatic terrain Marco Rubio will walk into on Thursday. He arrives in Rome representing an administration that has spied on the Vatican, mocked Pope Leo XIV, smeared him as a danger to American Catholics, and now publicly accused him of wanting Iran to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Cardinal Parolin’s Wednesday remarks were a quiet warning that the Vatican’s patience with Trump’s posture is running thin.
Rubio came to Rome with what was already a difficult portfolio: Cuba, Latin America, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the question of whether the United States and the Holy See can still find common ground on the dignity of the human person. That portfolio just got heavier.
What Pope Leo XIV will say to Rubio behind closed doors, only the two men will know. His public statements over the last three weeks are unmistakable. Pope Leo XIV has refused to be intimidated by this administration. The signal he sent through Parolin on Wednesday is that he would still take Donald Trump’s phone call if it came. As of Wednesday night, the ball is in the White House.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the millions of American Catholics — and countless others of goodwill — who refuse to accept a politics in which the leader of their Church is publicly slandered by the leader of their country.
We believe that the dignity of the human person is not a partisan slogan, that nuclear weapons are a moral evil the world must dismantle, and that the bishop of Rome speaks for a Gospel no White House can drown out.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. They are looking for moral clarity in a moment when the most powerful man on earth lies about the pope to score a domestic political point.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the cynicism that now defines American power — I am asking you to join us.
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