Vatican's careful words on pope-Rubio meeting imply deep tensions with Trump, say analysts

A Vatican statement after Pope Leo’s meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which said the two had pledged to improve bilateral relations, was a recognition of unprecedented tensions, insiders and analysts said.

Rubio’s meeting on Thursday with Pope Leo, the first US pope, garnered wide public attention as President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked the pontiff over the US-Israeli war on Iran.

The Vatican statement after the 45-minute encounter, the first between the pope and a Trump cabinet official in nearly a year, said the two leaders had “renewed the shared commitment to fostering good bilateral relations”.

“[The] statement makes it clear that, at present, there is work to do,” Peter Martin, a former diplomat at the US embassy to the Holy See who served during Democratic and Republican administrations, told Reuters.

Break with tradition of saying all is well

Austen Ivereigh, a Vatican specialist who co-wrote a book with the late Pope Francis, said the statement’s focus on the need to build bilateral relations suggests “that they are at the moment not good”.

The US embassy to the Holy See said on X after the meeting that Pope Leo and Rubio had discussed “topics of mutual interest in the Western Hemisphere”.

“The United States and Holy See partnership in advancing religious freedom is strong,” Rubio said on X, referencing his later meetings at the Vatican on Thursday with senior Vatican officials.

The Vatican statement covered both the pope-Rubio encounter and the secretary’s subsequent Vatican meetings, but mentioned neither the Western Hemisphere nor religious freedom.

It said there had been an “exchange of views” on the world situation, but gave no areas of common agreement other than toward building better bilateral relations.

Kenneth Hackett, who led the US Catholic Church’s foreign relief agency for 18 years before serving as ambassador to the Holy See under former president Barack Obama, said the Vatican statement indicated that “there were no substantive agreements”.

In Vatican diplomacy, ‘every word matters’

It is unusual for the Vatican to suggest it does not have good relations with a foreign nation.

After an earlier meeting on Thursday between Pope Leo and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, the Vatican said its diplomatic officials, in their meeting with Tusk, had “expressed satisfaction for the good relations” between Poland and the Vatican.

Martin, who was working at the US embassy during Trump’s visit to the Vatican with the late Pope Francis in 2017, noted that the Vatican’s release after that encounter had also “expressed satisfaction for the good relations” between the US and the Vatican, with the same phrasing.

“In the world of diplomacy —especially Vatican diplomacy — every word matters,” said Martin, who now teaches at Boston College in Massachusetts.

Pope Leo drew Trump’s ire after he became a critic of the US-Israeli war on Iran and the Trump administration’s hardline anti-immigration policies.

Trump has kept up an unprecedented series of public attacks on the pope in recent weeks, drawing a backlash from Christian leaders across the political spectrum. Trump and Pope Leo, who became pope a year ago, have never met.

It was also unusual for the Vatican’s statement on Thursday to reveal content of the discussions during the pope’s meeting with Rubio.

Such releases are usually carefully written to reveal only topics discussed in a visiting official’s meetings with senior Vatican diplomats and not during his or her papal encounter.

Ivereigh said the Vatican had to issue a statement given the intense media interest and “in anticipation of any White House spin”. The last time a Vatican statement revealed such details of a papal meeting was in September after Pope Leo’s encounter with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, when a release said the pope had raised the “tragic situation in Gaza” with Herzog.