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What does it mean when the most powerful nation on earth sends its Secretary of State — hat in hand — to the Bishop of Rome to repair a breach it created? The Washington Post is reporting this morning on Marco Rubio’s two-hour audience with Pope Leo XIV, a visit framed publicly as routine diplomacy but understood by everyone in Rome for what it actually is: a damage-control mission on behalf of a president who has conducted himself as a veritable bull in the china shop of Vatican diplomacy — trafficking in outright lies, displaying unprecedented contempt for the first American pope, and apparently unbothered by the wreckage he leaves behind. Donald Trump’s sustained, personal attacks on Leo XIV have done serious damage — to U.S. Catholic support, to European alliances, and to whatever remained of this administration’s moral credibility on the world stage. Cardinal Parolin’s assessment of the president’s broadsides was characteristically understated and characteristically devastating: “A little odd. A little odd.”
Now comes Marco Rubio — more polished than his boss, more fluent in the language of diplomacy, and by all accounts more capable of a coherent sentence. But the question hangs in the Roman air: can even the most skilled emissary dress up the boorishness of a narcissistic president who mistakes belligerence for strength and fabrication for policy? Read on.