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In an effort to smooth relations with Pope Leo XIV and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, the Trump administration is sending its best. Not Vice-President J.D. Vance, who may be the most prominent Catholic convert in the United States, but Marco Rubio, the secretary of State. Some perceive this as a snub to Vance, though Rubio’s presence on the mission has another logic: He is the nation’s top diplomat, was christened in the Catholic faith, and was married in a Catholic church, though he and his wife attended an Evangelical congregation for a number of years. In public, he refrains from attacking the pope, who decried “the delusion of omnipotence” behind the U.S. war on Iran. Vance, meanwhile, responded by telling Pope Leo to “stick to matters of morality.”
Rubio will visit the Vatican at a precarious moment for the relationship between the U.S. government and the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. Leo, the first U.S.-born pope, criticized the administration’s “extremely disrespectful” treatment of migrants last year. His remarks on Iran have enraged Donald Trump, who on Monday accused him of “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people.” Although Rubio says the trip was planned before Trump’s sniping, the friction is hard to ignore, and it may be the product of a much deeper rift. Trump, Vance, and Rubio all have distinctive religious identities, but in the White House, they tend to promote one version of Christianity while the pope represents another. The Iran war has only pushed the strains further apart, and Rubio’s diplomatic mission won’t bring them back together.
Rubio is an Iran hawk, and his position at State ties him to a broadly unpopular conflict ahead of a potential 2028 run for the White House. But Vance may be in a bigger bind. Ever the shapeshifter, he has zealously endorsed the war after he spent years criticizing foreign intervention, citing his service in Iraq. Voters may wonder what, if anything, that tour meant to him; now they may wonder the same thing about his faith. When Vance wrote an essay about his conversion to Catholicism in 2020, he struck familiar notes about his Mamaw, her “de-institutionalized faith,” and his bootstraps journey to Yale Law. But Vance also criticized “a conservative Catholic writer” who was hostile toward Pope Francis. “My growing view is that too many American Catholics have failed to show proper deference to the papacy, treating the pope as a political figure to be criticized or praised according to their whims,” he wrote.
The average American has probably not heard of The Lamp, where Vance published his essay. They may be more familiar with his statements over the past several years, which reveal him to be the sort of Catholic he named in his piece, who joins out of conviction, political expediency, or both. In 2025, he touted the doctrine of ordo amoris, or the order of love, to defend violent deportations. Americans “should love our family first, then our neighbors, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world,” he said. Pope Francis did not agree. “Christian love,” he wrote in a letter to U.S. bishops, “is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.” (He would later die a day after meeting Vance in the flesh.)
A 2025 column in the National Catholic Register associated Vance with “a series of prominent conservative converts” who reduce “Catholicism not just to ethics, but to an ideology.” That tendency comes through in Vance’s own account of his conversion. In his essay, he credits a talk by Peter Thiel with nudging him toward God’s truth. Professional and academic prestige would not cure meaninglessness, Thiel reportedly told the minds of Yale Law. Vance writes later that he saw in Catholicism an explanation for sin and a path to resistance. He’d wasted too much time trying to fit in with a smug and secular elite.
Vance will expand on his conversion in a new book, Communion, out next month, but he has linked himself to a hard-edged version of Catholicism since he first entered political life. He participated in a 2021 conference alongside Adrian Vermeule, another Catholic convert and a Harvard Law professor who espouses integralism, a system of government that would place the state under the direction of the Vatican. He has referred to himself as a post-liberal, aligning with other skeptics of liberal democracy, as The New Yorker reported in 2024. In general, Vance belongs to a New Right circle that has gained some traction in Washington and is becoming more radical and more anti-democratic. It includes Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, a far-right Catholic and Vance ally who is steering his institution further toward the fringe. Roberts endorsed Tucker Carlson after he interviewed the antisemitic Nick Fuentes last year. Later, an April report in the Washington Post said Roberts toasted Paul Gottfried of Chronicles magazine, a publisher of neo-Confederate and white-nationalist writers, at a dinner. Authoritarianism holds the Vance faction together and binds it, for now, to Trump. Pope Leo serves a different faith, and that makes him a target.
Some day soon, Vance will have to answer for his own allegiances. When Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as the pontiff last year, Vance sided with his real boss. “As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen,” he responded to Bill Kristol, a Trump critic who once cheered the war in Iraq. Now that Trump has started his own stupid war, he and Vance are less popular than the pope. Most Americans favor Pope Leo’s call for peace, according to a recent poll from YouGov and The Economist. A Wednesday poll from the Washington Post, ABC News, and Ipsos also found that nearly six in ten Americans had a negative view of a recent Trump broadside against the pope, whom he accused, falsely, of wanting Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But Vance is not concerned with Trump’s honesty; his priorities lie elsewhere. “How can you say that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword?” he said in April. “It’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology … You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth.”
Sarah Jones covers politics and labor.
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