becoming a firm critic of \u2060the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran<\/a> and the Trump administration’s hardline anti-immigration policies.<\/p>\nThe president has kept \u2060up an unprecedented series of public attacks on the pope in recent weeks, drawing a backlash from Christian leaders across the political spectrum.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Trump falsely suggested the pope believed it was OK for Iran to obtain nuclear weapons and said Leo was “endangering a lot of Catholics” by opposing the war.<\/p>\n
Leo told journalists after the latest attack that he was spreading the Christian message of peace. The pope also firmly rejected the idea that he supported nuclear weapons, which the Catholic Church teaches are immoral.<\/p>\n
“The mission of the church \u200cis to preach the gospel, to preach peace,” said the pope. “The church has spoken out for \u200byears against all nuclear arms, on that there is no doubt.”<\/p>\n
As Rubio arrived at the Vatican earlier on Thursday, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was leaving from a meeting with Leo. He told journalists he and the pope discussed how to strengthen international cooperation and generate hope in the world.<\/p>\n
“It is still possible that the world does not have to descend into chaos, if good people, people of goodwill, find one another and act in unity,” Tusk said, speaking in Polish.<\/p>\n
US ambassador expects ‘frank’ conversation<\/p>\n
Leo, who on Friday marks his first year leading the 1.4-billion-member church, has grown more outspoken on the world stage in recent weeks.<\/p>\n
During a four-nation African tour last month, he \u200bforcefully decried the direction of global leadership and said the world was “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants,” in comments he later said were not aimed directly at Trump.<\/p>\n
Rubio \u200cis Catholic, as \u200cis Vice President JD Vance. \u2060The two met Leo a year ago after attending the pope’s inaugural mass.<\/p>\n
Rubio said at a White House briefing on Tuesday that he expected to discuss Cuba and concerns over religious freedom around the world with Leo.<\/p>\n
He arrived in Rome Thursday morning without any press accompanying him on his plane, which is unusual for a secretary of state.<\/p>\n
The U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, Brian Burch, told journalists earlier on Tuesday that \u200cthe conversation between the pope and cabinet \u200bofficial was likely to be “frank.”<\/p>\n
Rubio is visiting Rome for two days. He is \u200cdue to meet Italian Prime Minister Giorgia \u2060Meloni, who has defended the \u200bpope from Trump, on Friday. Meloni’s defense minister has also said the war in Iran puts U.S. leadership at risk.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"VATICAN CITY \u2014 Secretary of State Marco Rubio left the Vatican on Thursday after seeing Pope Leo XIV…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60993,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121],"tags":[5397,5999,6000,4267,836,1411,186,1332,50,51,6001,2543,6002,113,5280,5998,6003,672],"class_list":{"0":"post-60992","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-marco-rubio","8":"tag-cars","9":"tag-classifieds","10":"tag-homes","11":"tag-international","12":"tag-jobs","13":"tag-local","14":"tag-marco-rubio","15":"tag-military","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-politics","18":"tag-radio","19":"tag-religion","20":"tag-salt-lake","21":"tag-sports","22":"tag-television","23":"tag-traffic","24":"tag-utah","25":"tag-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116533568889762061","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60992","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=60992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}