{"id":59751,"date":"2026-05-06T17:36:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T17:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/59751\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T17:36:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T17:36:09","slug":"can-sending-marco-rubio-to-rome-end-trumps-feud-with-pope-and-giorgia-meloni-maybe-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/59751\/","title":{"rendered":"Can sending Marco Rubio to Rome end Trump\u2019s feud with Pope and Giorgia Meloni? Maybe not"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio greets Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican in a May 19, 2025, file photo.Simone Risoluti\/Reuters<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Mr. Trump knew that Ms. Meloni, Italy\u2019s right-wing Prime Minister \u2013 known as the \u201cTrump Whisperer\u201d in the European media \u2013 was firmly installed in his nationalistic, anti-woke camp. She was the only European head of state to attend his inauguration.<\/p>\n

And Leo, the Cardinal and Chicago White Sox fan who became the first American pontiff in May, 2025, four months after Mr. Trump\u2019s inauguration, surely would not turn on the President.<\/p>\n

Since then, the leaders of Vatican and Italy have bolted from the White House barn. <\/p>\n

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, \u201cI have no fear of the Trump administration.\u201d Ms. Meloni came to the Pope\u2019s defence and also made it known that she was dead set against the war.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

U.S. President Donald Trump and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni share a lighter moment during her visit to the White House in April, 2025.Evelyn Hockstein\/Reuters<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

His effort may fail.<\/p>\n

Only two days before Mr. Rubio\u2019s 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 \u201cendangering a lot of Catholics \u2026 he thinks it\u2019s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.\u201d (Leo never said Iran should have nuclear weapons.)<\/p>\n

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. \u201cRubio may not realize that you cannot drive a wedge between the Vatican and Italy,\u201d said Francesco Galietti, CEO of Policy Sonar, a political risk consultancy in Rome. \u201cHis visit may only lead only to softer tones among the U.S., the Vatican and the Italian government.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an interview on Tuesday on the sidelines of an AI conference at Rome\u2019s Pontifical Gregorian University, Brian Burch, U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, said, \u201cI don\u2019t accept the idea that somehow there\u2019s a deep rift.\u201d But he did not deny that the two men had some issues to discuss. He said the U.S. and the Vatican need to \u201cbetter understand each other, and to work through, if there are differences, certainly to talk through that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Opinion: Donald Trump is not an aberration. He is America<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Polls show that Mr. Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s AI-generated image of himself in the guise of Jesus Christ, which he posted last month, did not endear himself with religious conservatives. <\/p>\n

In reality, the friction between the Vatican and the White House has been quietly building since late last year.<\/p>\n

The Washington Post reported that, in December, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican\u2019s Secretary of State, pleaded with U.S. ambassador Burch to arrange a meeting with Mr. Rubio. The Cardinal\u2019s goal, presumably with the Pope\u2019s approval, was to head off violence and bloodshed in Venezuela by allowing president Nicol\u00e1s 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.<\/p>\n

The war on Iran delivered another blow to U.S.-Vatican relations.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The friction between Pope Leo, seen at the Vatican on Wednesday, and the White House intensified with the outbreak of the Iran war.Yara Nardi\/Reuters<\/p>\n

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\u2019s name to justify the war. On his Palm Sunday address, Leo said that God \u201cdoes not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.\u201d He quoted Isaiah 1:15, saying \u201cEven though you make many prayers, I will not listen \u2013 your hands are full of blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leo called the war on Iran \u201cunjust.\u201d By then, it was game on from Mr. Trump, who denounced the Pope as a politician who was \u201ccatering to the Radical Left,\u201d that he was \u201cterrible for foreign policy.\u201d Mr. Trump\u2019s kept up his attacks, forcing Ms. Meloni to come to the rescue. She called Mr. Trump\u2019s attacks on the Pope \u201cunacceptable\u201d and said that, as head of the Catholic Church, it was \u201cright and normal for him to call for peace and to condemn every form of war.\u201d <\/p>\n

Given Mr. Trump\u2019s endless attacks on Leo and Ms. Meloni \u2013 \u201cI thought she had courage, but I was wrong,\u201d he told an Italian newspaper \u2013 observers have low expectations for a diplomatic breakthrough in Rome by Mr. Rubio.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump wants to challenge the Catholic Church instead of engaging in adequate and discreet diplomatic relations,\u201d said Gianluigi Pelloni, the Italian founding director of the Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis. \u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio greets Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[1977,1963,1978,367,1955,1979,1976,1954,1969,1970,1966,1956,1953,1579,1846,1974,1968,1962,273,1990,1957,1958,383,1964,1965,1960,1980,1961,1985,1986,1988,1983,1987,1981,1984,1959,1972,1973,51,1971,1982,1134,584,1975,1967,48,52,1989],"class_list":{"0":"post-59751","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-giorgia-meloni","8":"tag-alberta","9":"tag-arts-news","10":"tag-bc","11":"tag-breaking-news","12":"tag-breaking-news-video","13":"tag-british-columbia","14":"tag-canada","15":"tag-canada-news","16":"tag-canada-sports","17":"tag-canada-sports-news","18":"tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","19":"tag-canadian-breaking-news","20":"tag-canadian-news","21":"tag-economy","22":"tag-education","23":"tag-environment","24":"tag-federal-government","25":"tag-foreign-news","26":"tag-giorgia-meloni","27":"tag-globe-and-mail","28":"tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","29":"tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","30":"tag-government","31":"tag-life-news","32":"tag-lifestyle","33":"tag-local-news","34":"tag-manitoba","35":"tag-national-news","36":"tag-new-brunswick","37":"tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","38":"tag-northwest-territories","39":"tag-nova-scotia","40":"tag-nunavut","41":"tag-ontario","42":"tag-pei","43":"tag-photos","44":"tag-political-news","45":"tag-political-opinion","46":"tag-politics","47":"tag-politics-news","48":"tag-quebec","49":"tag-sports-news","50":"tag-technology","51":"tag-travel","52":"tag-trudeau","53":"tag-us-news","54":"tag-world-news","55":"tag-yukon"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}