US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will sit down with Pope Leo XIV on Thursday.
Rubio will meet the pope in the Vatican’s apostolic palace on Thursday morning, and he is also expected to sit down with other top Vatican officials including Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Holy See’s Secretary of State.

It is the second meeting between Rubio, who is a devout Catholic, and the Chicago-born pope, and the first known meeting between a member of the administration and Leo in almost a year. Rubio and Vice President JD Vance met him after his inauguration mass last year.
One of the topics also likely to be discussed on Thursday is Cuba. The Trump administration has ratcheted up its economic blockade of the island as it attempts to force Havana into a political deal and the US president has continued to raise the specter of military intervention. The Vatican, meanwhile, is active diplomatically in Cuba and helped to broker the recent release of prisoners. The Trump administration has worked with the Catholic Church to distribute $6 million in humanitarian aid on the island, Rubio said Tuesday.

“We’re willing to get more humanitarian aid to Cuba, by the way, distributed through the church,” Rubio added.

Francesco Sisci, the director of the Appia Institute, a thinktank that follows Vatican diplomacy, said, “they will talk about Cuba, and it would be strange if they don’t. But the devil is in the detail.” While he said the Vatican would be supportive of a “transition” in Cuba’s political leadership, asking the pope to bless any violent action is very difficult.

Sisci told CNN that the church will “take into account the good will” of Rubio coming to the Vatican but will be “wary of manipulation.” He likened meeting as a modern day “Canossa,” referring to the time when the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, in 1077 made a public apology and submission to Pope Gregory VII.
Rubio on Tuesday also suggested that the two sides would find common ground on concerns about the persecution of Christian minorities in Africa, where Leo recently visited.

“We have a lot to talk about with them, and I engage with them quite a bit on that front,” he said.

Still, the areas of disagreement between the papacy and the US administration are significant. Christopher White, a senior fellow at the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University said the war in Iran will be “top of the agenda” for the meeting along with “the treatment of migrants and the marginalized, AI” and USAID cuts.