Now, US officials see an opportunity to strengthen relations with Leo, the first pontiff from the United States, whose focus on ending the world’s most destructive conflicts dovetails with the vision Trump laid out for himself as “peacemaker,” during last week’s visit to the Middle East.
At Mass during his inauguration Sunday, Leo called for peace in three war-torn regions: Gaza, where “the surviving children, families, older people are reduced to hunger”; Myanmar, where unrest has “cut short innocent young lives”; and Ukraine, which “awaits negotiations for a fair and lasting peace.”
A Vatican readout of the papal audience confirmed only that it happened, with no mention of content. It noted that Vance subsequently met with Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, a senior Vatican diplomat, for “cordial talks” on topics that included “ecclesial life and religious freedom,” as well as respect for humanitarian law and negotiated solutions in conflict zones.
Vance presented Leo with gifts including a Chicago Bears jersey emblazoned with “Pope Leo” and a tome by St. Augustine. Leo is an Augustinian, while Vance chose St. Augustine as his patron saint when he converted to Catholicism and was baptized in 2019.
On Saturday, Rubio met with the Vatican’s point man on Ukraine, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, and welcomed the Holy See as a possible venue for Russia-Ukraine peace talks and as a facilitator for returning the hundreds of Ukrainian children taken to Russia during the war.
“We thank the Holy See for its willingness to be involved in this process,” Rubio said before the meeting. “I think it’s a place that both sides would be comfortable going.”
American officials say several US initiatives are in harmony with the Vatican’s call for peace, including the US push for Hamas and Israel to agree to a ceasefire proposal and Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
A Vance aide pointed to the vice president’s remarks at this year’s National Catholic Prayer Breakfast as indicative of his thinking of where the Catholic Church’s priorities and Trump’s intersect.
“Where I think President Trump’s policy is most in accord with Christian social teaching and with the Catholic faith is that more than any president of my lifetime, President Trump has pursued a path of peace,” Vance said.
Trump’s branding of himself as a peacemaker is complicated by his nearly two-month bombing campaign in Yemen, which has caused civilian deaths, and his authorizing of billions of dollars in weapons deliveries to Israel, including 2,000-pound bombs that the Biden administration held up out of a stated concern about civilian casualties.
Vance, a Catholic convert, and Rubio, raised in the faith by his Cuban immigrant parents, say religion plays an important role in their lives. But whether they can bridge the Vatican gap is far from clear.
Some observers have seized on Leo’s embrace of Francis’s teachings, his background ministering to the poor in Peru, and social media posts on a now-defunct X account under his name to conclude that he will emerge as the anti-Trump – an American whose call for human dignity for all from the Vatican serves as a counter to the unbridled nationalism of the White House.
In his initial public comments, Leo appeared to largely steer clear of culture war debates. That changed Friday in a keynote speech to diplomats to the Holy See in which he echoed his predecessor by calling for the dignity of migrants and a fight against “global inequalities.” But he also was a far cry from being a “woke” pope, calling for societies to be “founded upon the stable union between a man and a woman.”
The biggest point of departure between Leo and the Trump administration is almost sure to be migration and social justice. Posts spanning nearly a decade from a social media account under Leo’s given name criticized the administration’s anti-migrant campaigns. The Vatican did not confirm or deny on Friday whether the account had been controlled by Leo before he was named pope, saying it would not comment on events preceding his papacy.
One February post from the account targeted Vance’s argument that “ordo amoris” – a medieval Catholic concept – could be used to defend deportations by outlining a pecking order of Christian care, with the family first, followed by neighbors, the community, fellow citizens, and lastly those beyond. Days later, Francis would dispatch a letter to US bishops echoing the rejection of Vance’s argument.
“JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” read the post, repeating the headline of a shared article in the National Catholic Reporter critical of Vance’s comment.
Other posts portray a former missionary who spent years defending migrant rights, including aiding Venezuelan migrants who had fled to Peru, the country where Leo served the church for years, and became a naturalized dual citizen. In 2017, one post retweeted by the account said Trump’s “bad hombres” line fuels “racism and nativism.” Another retweet began: “I stand with the #Dreamers.”
The account retweeted a statement from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops condemning the “violence and hatred” during the 2017 Charlottesville riot, and shared multiple posts on racial injustice after the police killing of George Floyd, including one urging church leaders to “reject racism and seek justice.”
On Friday, Leo noted that his own life had been marked by an “aspiration to transcend borders” and called for “respect for the dignity of every person,” including “citizens and immigrants alike.”
He highlighted that his family, like the vast majority of Americans, had immigrant roots.
US officials say privately that the large gap between Trump and the Vatican over migrant policy is largely unbridgeable, but Rubio told The Washington Post that the two positions are not inconsistent and there is virtue in stemming the flow of mass migration.
“There is not incompatibility,” Rubio said. “I would argue there’s nothing compassionate about mass migration. There’s nothing compassionate about open borders that allows people to be trafficked here.”
Rubio has also insisted that the Vatican should not be treated as a political entity.
“I understand there’s this temptation to cover the papacy as a political office. It is not a political office. It is a spiritual office,” he said.
Since becoming pope, Leo has appeared to reach out to Catholic conservatives who felt alienated by Francis, embracing the traditional vestments of popes and other symbols rejected by his predecessor. As pope, Leo has also not directly criticized the Trump administration.
Sharp critics of Francis have bristled at the idea of Leo as the political anti-Trump.
“Sacrilege,” German Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller told The Post.
“God has instituted [Leo] with his mission to preach the gospel and not to make politics in favor of this or that. President of the United States or of Russia or the Communist Party in China. The pope is absolutely above this.”
But others senior officials in the church have suggested that Leo, through his words and deeds, will live as a sharp contrast to, and lesson against, Trump.
“It is difficult to imagine someone whose character is more unlike another American who has pretended to be pope,” Swedish Cardinal Anders Arborelius said in a statement.
Mike Madrid, a prominent GOP political strategist, cofounder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, and expert on Latino-American Catholicism, said it feels impossible to predict how Vance will respond to the new pope because Vance is part of something newly mainstream in America: trad-Catholic, right-wing politics.
There have long been outspoken traditional Catholics, Madrid said, but “as a politician, to lean into this morality politics that’s part of Evangelicalism and the culture of the Southern Baptist Convention – that’s never been a defining part of [US] Catholics’ politics. This is new and unique.”
“There will be very significant differences between Pope Leo and this Bannon-Vance wing of the church,” he added, referring to Trump’s former aide Stephen K. Bannon, who has criticized the church’s support for migrants. “It’s hard to know where this is going.”