“Wow, Okay!” — Pope Leo XIV’s Verdict on Marco Rubio’s Crystal Football
Pope Leo XIV gave Marco Rubio an olive-wood pen and called it the plant of peace. Rubio handed back the same crystal football he gives every world leader — and the first Washington Post polling shows Americans noticed.
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This morning at the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV gave Marco Rubio a pen carved from olive wood and a book of sacred art. “Olive,” the pope said as he handed them over, “is the plant of peace.” The Secretary of State, in return, handed back a crystal football paperweight — the same crystal football, by all accounts, that he gives every world leader he meets.
Then, on camera, the pope paused. “Wow,” he said. “Okay!”
This kind-hearted response is in many ways the entire story of this morning’s Vatican audience between the Holy Father and the Secretary of State of the United States — three syllables, delivered live on camera, that no diplomatic readout could approximate.
I cannot stop watching the moment.
The olive is Christ’s tree from Gethsemane. The Catholic moral tradition — from the prophets through Pacem in Terris — has invoked it again and again as the language of peace. The gift Pope Leo handed Rubio was a teaching as much as an object.
He chose it deliberately. The moral leader of 1.4 billion Catholics, watching an American administration drop ordnance on Iranian children, handed an American Secretary of State a sign of refusal — written in the wood of an olive tree, accompanied by a book of sacred art the Vatican uses to instruct visitors to seek peace.
Rubio handed back a crystal football.
The football, by all accounts, is the standard crystal paperweight Rubio carries with him to diplomatic meetings — the State Department seal on one side, no theology, no symbol, nothing chosen for the man across the table. He acknowledged the mismatch himself. “You’re a baseball guy,” he told Pope Leo, who is famously a Chicago White Sox fan, “but it has the seal of the State Department.”
Then came this line: “What to get someone who has everything?”
The man who had everything is the moral leader of 1.4 billion Catholics and wants peace.
In March, he called the bombing of Iran a scandal for humanity. The Secretary of State of the United States flew to Rome to repair that breach, and he brought the same trinket he gives to anyone.
Then came the pope’s response.
“Wow. Okay.”
Pope Leo XIV is, by long temperament and by every account a gracious man. He always is. That graciousness is what makes the moment land. There is a thing Rome does when an American visitor hands the Holy See something unserious — the pope smiles politely, says nothing of substance, and moves on.
That is what we watched this morning.
This is a story about a man who was sent to do a serious thing and did not understand why it was serious.
Marco Rubio arrived at the Apostolic Palace this morning, representing an administration that has spent the last month attacking Pope Leo XIV.
The president went on Hugh Hewitt’s show this week and accused the Holy Father of wanting Tehran armed with the bomb.
Two days before the audience, Trump continued the smear, claiming the pope was endangering a lot of Catholics. JD Vance, who has carried the rebukes of two popes, has spent eighteen months suggesting to the media that the bishops are corrupt.
The Vatican’s own diplomats, Cardinal Pietro Parolin chief among them, called the smear campaign a bit strange.
That was the moment Rubio was sent to repair. The meeting itself called for seriousness, for visible humility, for some sign that the senior Catholic Trump sent to Rome had heard what the universal Church has been telling his president for two months.
He brought a football.
The diplomatic record matched the optics. The Vatican’s 120-word readout described what passed between Leo and Rubio as an “exchange of views” — the formula Rome reaches for when a meeting failed to find common ground.
State’s read just 53 words.
The Middle East got a sentence; “topics of mutual interest in the Western Hemisphere” got a phrase. There was nothing else to say.
The American people, as it turns out, were watching too.
The first round of Washington Post polling out this week — and I will publish a fuller breakdown of the numbers in a separate post — shows the public has turned on the Trump-Vance administration’s treatment of Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic Church.
The numbers are decisive. They represent the first visible measurement of the political damage the past month has done.
The smears have cost the administration politically.
Catholic voters who stood with Trump in the early weeks of the war are no longer standing with him over the public mockery of the Holy Father.
The cardinals' rebukes — Cardinal McElroy ruling the war not morally legitimate, Cardinal Parolin telling Trump to put an end to it, the military archdiocese declaring the war not sponsored by the Lord — have landed where it counts.
This is the part that should worry Marco Rubio.
Until today, that political damage was Trump’s problem and, to a lesser extent, Vance’s. Trump ordered the bombing of Iran. Then he smeared the pope on Hugh Hewitt’s show.
The vice president has been at war with the bishops for over a year. Rubio could plausibly tell himself he was the steady hand — the Catholic voice in the cabinet, the man who would walk into the Apostolic Palace and quietly reset the relationship.
Rubio had one job today. By now, it’s clear he had failed it.
The bombing of Iran has not stopped. Trump continues to smear the Holy Father on talk radio. The American people, who watched all of it, are filing their own verdict — and now Marco Rubio is on the receiving end too.
The football is on the Vatican’s gift table. The olive-wood pen will end up somewhere on the seventh floor at Foggy Bottom. The pope keeps the football, along with the war the administration came to Rome asking him to bless.
Both are now Marco Rubio’s to carry, too.
Wow. Okay.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV — the moral leader of one billion Catholics — and with the bishops, the priests, and the millions of American Catholics and people of goodwill who watched this morning’s Vatican audience and recognized exactly what it meant.
A Holy Father offered the sign of peace this country desperately needed. He received a piece of crystal cut to look like a football. The polling will keep saying what the country thinks about that.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because Americans want a Church that names what it sees and a movement willing to act on what it hears. The bombing of Iran cannot be reconciled with Catholic teaching, and the mockery of the Holy Father is the language of an administration that has lost its moral argument.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a presidency that bombs and mocks and now expects the pope to bless both — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Once again, Rubio has shown that he is not up to the task in diplomacy, much less on how to discuss and understand fundamental scriptures and the teachings of Jesus. Pope Leo was gracious, but he did not cede any moral authority in agreeing with the Trump regime's immoral war of choice. If I were given such a beautiful teaching gift by Pope Leo, my eyes would well up in joy and appreciation. Thank you Pope Leo for your efforts.
Wow. Just wow. Not ok.