Rubio visits Vatican, Italy to ease Trump tensions with Pope Leo XIV

Marco Rubio’s Rome visit mixed symbolism with diplomacy: a Vatican audience meant to steady relations after Donald Trump’s criticism of Pope Leo XIV, followed by a ceremonial handoff of papers tracing Rubio’s own family roots to Piedmont. The question hanging over both moments was whether the trip produced any real repair in the strained relationship between the White House and the Catholic Church.

Rubio met Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on May 7, one day before the pope marked his first year leading the 1.4 billion-member Catholic Church. The Vatican said the two had an “exchange of views,” while Rubio said he stressed shared commitments to peace, human dignity and religious freedom. The meeting came after Trump had publicly attacked the pope over his stance on the Iran war, giving Rubio’s stop an unusually delicate diplomatic edge.

Rubio said the Italy trip, scheduled for May 6-8, had been planned before the dispute erupted, but the timing made the mission impossible to read as routine. Italian media cast the journey as a relations-thawing effort, and Rubio’s stop in Rome also included meetings with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani. In a separate discussion at the Italian foreign ministry, Tajani said he and Rubio talked about Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and broader political and economic ties between the two countries.

The most visibly personal moment came on May 8 at the Palazzo della Farnesina, where Tajani, Piedmont Region President Alberto Cirio and Casale Monferrato Mayor Emanuele Capra presented Rubio with a family tree and archival documents certifying his Italian origins. The papers reportedly traced his ancestry to Casale Monferrato in northern Piedmont, turning a formal diplomatic stop into a public nod to heritage and identity. Rubio called receiving the documentation a “true honor” and said a visit to Piedmont would be “one more reason” to return to Italy.

For the Vatican, the White House and Italy, the visit left a clearer picture of tone than outcome. Rubio arrived with praise, protocol and ancestral papers, but the deeper measure remains whether Washington and the Holy See have actually moved beyond the rupture Trump created.