JD Vance invites Pope Leo to the White House on behalf of Trump during first meeting

Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio held their first formal meeting with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican a day after attending the pontiff’s inaugural mass.

During his visit to the Apostolic Palace on Monday morning, Vance, a Catholic convert, gave the 69-year-old Chicago-born pontiff a letter penned by President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump in which the couple urged him to visit the White House.

According to video footage of the meeting taken by Vatican Media and obtained by the Associated Press, Pope Leo was heard saying, “at some point.”

In the private meeting, which was initially one-on-one before they were also joined by Second Lady Usha Vance, Rubio and his wife Jeanette Rubio, the vice president’s office said that Leo was given two of St Augustine’s most seminal works: The City of God and On Christian Doctrine.

A third gift was a Chicago Bears T-shirt adorned with “Pope Leo XIV.”

In return, Leo gave Vance a bronze sculpture with “Peace is a fragile flower” etched in Italian. The vice president also received a small picture book of the papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace.

“As you can probably imagine, people in the United States are extremely excited about you,” Vance told the pope upon exchanging gifts.

The meeting comes less than a month after Vance met the late Pope Francis, who had previously rebuked the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans, a day before his death on Easter Sunday.

Vance and Rubio also met with Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Paul Gallagher on Monday for a “cordial” meeting that reaffirmed “good bilateral relations.”

“There was an exchange of views on some current international issues, calling for respect for humanitarian law and international law in areas of conflict and for a negotiated solution between the parties involved,” the Vatican said in a statement.

The meetings were set against a backdrop of simmering tensions with the papacy publicly criticizing Vance’s understanding of Catholicism and the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. In return, some conservative pundits and MAGA loyalists have complained about what they deemed the pontiff’s progressive values.

The Trump administration hopes to hold out an olive branch and reset relations with the Vatican by working harmoniously on resolving Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The vice president led the U.S. delegation to Pope Leo’s inaugural mass on Sunday, during which the pontiff called for peace in Gaza, Ukraine, and Myanmar.

A source in the Ukrainian delegation told Reuters that Vance and Rubio also met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump is expected to speak to both Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday.

For the rest of the day, Vance met with foreign leaders, including European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Italy’s Premier Giorgia Meloni, who said she hoped the meeting could be a “new beginning.”