Can Marco Rubio repair the rift between Donald Trump, Pope Leo XIV and Giorgia Meloni? Probably not

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The list of leaders in Europe whom Donald Trump could count on, or thought he could, for support grew rather short in 2025 as he ramped up his trans-Atlantic tariff war and criticized NATO. Pope Leo XIV and Giorgia Meloni seemed among his few remaining allies.

Mr. Trump knew that Ms. Meloni, Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister – known as the “Trump Whisperer” in the European media – was firmly installed in his nationalistic, anti-woke camp. She was the only European head of state to attend his inauguration.

And Leo, the Cardinal and Chicago White Sox fan who became the first American pontiff in May, 2025, four months after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, surely would not turn on the President.

Since then, the leaders of Vatican and Italy have bolted from the White House barn.

The rupture came last month, when Mr. Trump went on a social media rampage against Leo, who had questioned the moral legitimacy of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. The Pope, who rarely addresses his critics by name, broke form and said, “I have no fear of the Trump administration.” Ms. Meloni came to the Pope’s defence and also made it known that she was dead set against the war.

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Evidently rattled, the White House is dispatching Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Rome to meet Leo, Ms. Meloni, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani and Defence Minister Guido Crosetto. His meetings start Thursday morning, when he sees the Pope.

His effort may fail.

Only two days before Mr. Rubio’s visit to Rome, Mr. Trump diverted his ire back at the Pope. Speaking to Hugh Hewitt, a conservative radio talk-show host in the U.S., he accused Leo of “endangering a lot of Catholics … he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” (Leo never said Iran should have nuclear weapons.)

Historically, the Vatican and the Italian government have been allies and Mr. Rubio might not know that making nice with the Pope and not with Ms. Meloni, or vice versa, is doomed to fail; there will be no partial victories in Rome. “Rubio may not realize that you cannot drive a wedge between the Vatican and Italy,” said Francesco Galietti, CEO of Policy Sonar, a political risk consultancy in Rome. “His visit may only lead only to softer tones among the U.S., the Vatican and the Italian government.”

In an interview on Tuesday on the sidelines of an AI conference at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, Brian Burch, U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, said, “I don’t accept the idea that somehow there’s a deep rift.” But he did not deny that the two men had some issues to discuss. He said the U.S. and the Vatican need to “better understand each other, and to work through, if there are differences, certainly to talk through that.”

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There is little doubt that the Trump White House is intimidated by the popularity of Leo and the unpopularity of the war on Iran. Ms. Meloni won’t be able to sway votes in the U.S. in the mid-term elections in November, when the Senate and the House of Representatives, both under Republican control, come up for grabs. The Pope could, since there are 70 million Catholics in the U.S.

Polls show that Mr. Trump’s popularity among Catholics has fallen. If they decline ahead of the mid-terms, the Republicans could be in trouble in the swing states. Mr. Trump’s AI-generated image of himself in the guise of Jesus Christ, which he posted last month, did not endear himself with religious conservatives.

In reality, the friction between the Vatican and the White House has been quietly building since late last year.

The Washington Post reported that, in December, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, pleaded with U.S. ambassador Burch to arrange a meeting with Mr. Rubio. The Cardinal’s goal, presumably with the Pope’s approval, was to head off violence and bloodshed in Venezuela by allowing president Nicolás Maduro to seek asylum in Russia. The attempt failed and, reportedly, a U.S. Special Forces team killed 75 people in the raid that captured Mr. Maduro.

The war on Iran delivered another blow to U.S.-Vatican relations.

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Shortly after the U.S. and Israel began their attacks on Feb. 28, Leo, who had been regarded as a shrinking violet during much of his first year, emerged as a sharp critic of the war. He denounced both Mr. Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth for invoking God’s name to justify the war. On his Palm Sunday address, Leo said that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.” He quoted Isaiah 1:15, saying “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen – your hands are full of blood.”

Leo called the war on Iran “unjust.” By then, it was game on from Mr. Trump, who denounced the Pope as a politician who was “catering to the Radical Left,” that he was “terrible for foreign policy.” Mr. Trump’s kept up his attacks, forcing Ms. Meloni to come to the rescue. She called Mr. Trump’s attacks on the Pope “unacceptable” and said that, as head of the Catholic Church, it was “right and normal for him to call for peace and to condemn every form of war.”

Given Mr. Trump’s endless attacks on Leo and Ms. Meloni – “I thought she had courage, but I was wrong,” he told an Italian newspaper – observers have low expectations for a diplomatic breakthrough in Rome by Mr. Rubio.

“Trump wants to challenge the Catholic Church instead of engaging in adequate and discreet diplomatic relations,” said Gianluigi Pelloni, the Italian founding director of the Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis. “But the policies of Trump and Co. inevitably clash with the values and policies of the Vatican. Furthermore, the diplomacy and bureaucracy managed by the Pope has over a thousand years of experience and high-level personnel. Even the U.S. in its heyday treated the Vatican with caution.”