Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the man in the Trump administration who will try to mend relations between the White House and the Vatican after the president’s recent statements against Pope Leo XIV (“weak and terrible at foreign policy. I much prefer his brother Louis who is totally Maga. He has it all figured out”).
At 11.30 on Thursday 7 May Pope Leo XIV will receive Marco Rubio in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. It will be the third meeting between Rubio and the American Pope. The Secretary of State had already met the Pontiff originally from Chicago on May 18, on the occasion of the Mass for the beginning of the Petrine ministry. Vice President JD Vance was also present at the hand kiss with Rubio that day. The following day, May 19, a bilateral meeting took place between Leo XIV and Vance and Rubio themselves, the two Catholics closest to Trump.
Vance, raised in an evangelical environment, converted to Catholicism in 2019. Rubio’s Catholic background is not linear but rather “hybrid”: family Catholic roots, a Mormon parenthesis, a return to Catholicism, but with a certain openness towards the evangelical world. All intertwined with his conservative political vision.
Rubio was born in 1971 in Miami, Florida, to Cuban parents who emigrated to the United States after Fidel Castro’s revolution. His family was originally Catholic, but during his childhood he went through a phase of distancing himself from the Church. For a few years, in Las Vegas, he attended a Mormon community (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) with his parents.
In his autobiography published in 2012, An American Son, Rubio talks about his three years as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and thanks the Mormon Church for helping his family when they moved from Miami to Las Vegas. “The Mormon Church provided us with the strong moral structure my mother wanted for us and a circle of friends from stable, God-fearing families,” Rubio writes in her book. “When we left the Church a few years later, mostly on my initiative, we did so with gratitude for its notable contribution to our happiness in those years,” he adds.
Today, Rubio identifies as a practicing Catholic. And it flaunts this belonging. On March 5, 2025, he appeared on Fox News with the sign of the ash cross on his forehead, a symbol that marks the beginning of Lent for Catholics. However, he also maintained ties to evangelical circles (his wife Jeannette was linked to an evangelical church and he himself attended Protestant services at some stages in his life).
From a political point of view, his Catholicism is reflected above all in conservative positions on ethical issues: he is against abortion, supports a traditional vision of marriage and often refers to faith as an important element of his public identity.
His mission to Rome (where he will also see Antonio Tajani and perhaps Giorgia Meloni) will also have the aim of calming the dismay of American Catholics, shocked by Trump’s harsh criticism of the pontiff.
