Pope Leo meets with Vance, who delivers an invitation to visit the White House

ROME — At a meeting between Vice President JD Vance and Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Monday, the vice president presented the first U.S. pontiff — a Chicago native — with a Chicago Bears jersey, with “Pope Leo XIV” emblazoned in white and orange letters on the back. “Good choice,” the pope responded.
 
This first formal meeting appeared part of an effort by Washington to reset relations with the Vatican, after Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis repeatedly criticized President Trump’s migration policy.

Now the diplomatic efforts to bring a negotiated ceasefire to Ukraine may provide an opportunity for common ground. In these first days of his papacy, Leo has already called for an “authentic and lasting peace” in Ukraine. President Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday, as part of what he has called an attempt to stop the “bloodbath” of the war in Ukraine.

Joining Vance, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 2019, at Monday’s Vatican meeting with Pope Leo were Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also Catholic, and the two U.S. officials’ wives. Vance delivered a letter from the president and first lady inviting the pope to visit the White House, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Monday. The Vatican did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for comment about the invitation.

After the papal audience, Vance met with officials at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, the Church’s top diplomatic office. A Vatican readout called those talks “cordial.”

“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,” it said.

Before his rise to the papacy, Cardinal Robert Prevost appeared to have shared news articles via an account on the social media platform X that were critical of the Trump administration’s plans for mass deportations of migrants. The Vatican has not commented on whether the posts were authentic. The account has since been removed. Last week, in his first address to world diplomats as pontiff, Pope Leo said the dignity of migrants had to be respected.

The late Pope Francis made immigrants and the poor a central focus of his papacy. He called Trump’s plan to deport millions of migrants a “disgrace.” And in early 2016, he famously declared Trump — then a Republican candidate for president — “not Christian” for his pledge to prevent people from crossing illegally into the United States by building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Francis also rebuked Vance for calling on Christians to prioritize love for their families and countrymen over strangers and foreigners.

“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extends to other persons and groups,” Francis wrote in a letter to U.S. bishops after Vance’s remarks. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Vance met with Pope Francis the day before he died.

Both he and Rubio attended the inaugural Mass for Pope Leo on Sunday. At Vance’s meeting on Monday, he gave Leo two works by St. Augustine, The City of God and On Christian Doctrine, the vice president’s office said. Leo is the first Augustinian pope.

Leo gave Vance a coffee-table sized picture book about the papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace and a bronze sculpture bearing a message in Italian, La pace è un fiore fragile, “Peace is a fragile flower.”

The Vatican has long offered to try to help facilitate talks between Ukraine and Russia, but had become largely sidelined in the negotiations around Ukraine-Russia war, with comments by Pope Francis upsetting both sides at different points in the conflict.

The Vatican has continued to seek to help facilitate the return of Ukrainian children taken by Russia and the Holy See has been able to mediate some prisoner exchanges.

On Saturday, Rubio said the Vatican could be a good venue for Russia-Ukraine peace talks. Asked if the Vatican could be a peace broker, Rubio replied: “I wouldn’t call it broker, but it’s certainly — I think it’s a place that both sides would be comfortable going.”

He then met with Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the Vatican point man on Ukraine, to further discuss ways, Rubio said, that the Vatican could help “the path forward” in Ukraine.