Sorry, excuse me, will probably have to say the American Secretary of State, that is, Foreign Minister Marco Antonio Rubio, in the audience granted to him by his compatriot Pope Leo XIV, after the US president Donald Trump, with his brain now seemingly blown out of his head as in Stefano Rolli’s merciless cartoon in Secolo XIX, attacked him again. He accused him, in particular, of putting the lives of Catholics worldwide at risk with his pacifist leniency, so to speak, towards those who persecute them.
This is not the first time a Pope has been reproached and lectured from across the Atlantic, directly or indirectly, on how to defend endangered Catholics worldwide. It also happened to Pius XII, the Roman, indeed very Roman Eugenio Pacelli, in an audience granted in the 1950s to the American ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe Luce, appointed by President Eisenhower and very active also with our government in requesting, recommending, urging, and so forth a policy increasingly anti-communist, given also the conditions to which Catholics had been reduced in the then Soviet Union.
The Pope let her speak for a while without signs of impatience, I don’t know if for reasons more of gender or strict diplomacy, given the size and role of the United States, then indisputably leading the West. But in the end, he burst out telling her that as Pontiff of the Holy Roman Church he believed he knew how to do his job well. The ambassador left that audience somewhat shocked, like Trump recently from the defense of Pope Leo XIV made by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni after his initial attacks and rejections by the White House. Shocked to the point of later complaining privately to Indro Montanelli, already very famous at that time, inviting him to be wary of that Pope so widely mistaken for an anti-communist.
