On April 9, 2026, two days after meeting with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican to ease tensions between U.S. President Donald Trump and the Pope, Secretary of State Marco Rubio released a video discussing Catholicism’s role in shaping America ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary at the The Catholic University of America’s Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. [1] Unfortunately, Rubio is reinterpreting historical events and fundamentally reshaping the identity of the United States by portraying the nation’s founding and political philosophy as being rooted in Catholic tradition and theology.
Rubio claims that the purpose of America’s system of government seeks to promote the “common good,” a phrase closely linked to Catholic social doctrine. He has also argued that America’s founding principles come from the same tradition that produced the magnificent cathedrals of Rome and are rooted in the teachings of influential Catholic theologians such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. In Rubio’s view, America represents the fulfillment of the hopes and dreams of the Old World, and he has even described the United States as one of the strongest examples of the lasting influence of the Catholic faith on society and public life.
Marco Rubio made the following remarks on Thursday, April 9, 2026, at the Catholic University of America’s Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition:
• “In 1895, Pope Leo XIII penned an encyclical to the Catholic Church in the United States. ‘All intelligent men are agreed,’ he wrote, ‘that America seems destined for greater things.’ Now it is our wish that the Catholic Church should not only share in, but help to bring about this prospective greatness” (Video).
• “Some have claimed that the Catholic faith is a foreign import to our country. Only One of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence was Catholic Charles Carroll of Maryland, for whom one of this conference’s hosts is named. Just two Catholic names appear on our Constitution itself” (Video).
• “But the Catholic faith has always been part of the American story. The first Christian service on our soil was a Catholic Mass. The oldest permanent settlement in the United States is the town of St. Augustine. Planted by Spanish Catholics on the coastal sands of my home state of Florida. Catholic saints were martyred on American soil well over a century before the Revolution began” (Video).
• “In missions and settlements, wilderness forts and trading posts stretching from the first colonies to the distant frontier, Catholic explorers, soldiers, priests and pioneers consecrated this new world to their ancient faith and christened its land with Catholic names. Maryland, St. Louis, San Francisco. Santa Fe. Almost every region of what is now the United States was first explored and mapped by Catholics. This is no coincidence” (Video).
• “We see this in the structure of our political order itself, built not to sanction, license, but to restrain passion, check ambition with ambition and secure the common good” (Video).
• “It is true, of course, that most of the men who wrote our founding documents were not Catholics themselves. But the system they gave us belongs to the same civilizational tradition that produced the towering cathedrals of Rome and the philosophy of Augustine and Aquinas” (Video).
• “America was a gift where the Church and the civilization it made was reborn, discovering itself anew in the wilderness. It is at once modern and ancient. The men who settled and founded our country were the architects of a great rebirth, renewing the deferred dreams of the Old World and the possibilities of a virgin continent” (Video).
• “It has been 250 years since a new people declared themselves to the world. At the time, less than 2% were Catholic. But the nation they built would come to serve as one of the proudest and most enduring testaments to the eternal truth of our faith” (Video).
Marco Rubio claimed that Pope Leo XIII believed America was destined for greatness and expressed his desire that the Catholic Church would “help bring about” that greatness. But that reflects Rome’s vision for America—not the vision established by the U.S. Constitution. Rubio has embraced and promoted a Catholicized interpretation of American history, arguing that America’s political system belongs to the same intellectual tradition that produced “the towering cathedrals of Rome” and the philosophy of Augustine and Aquinas.
He further described America as a place where “the Church and the civilization it created were reborn.” Yet this is historical revisionism. America’s founding documents were not written to enthrone Rome, Augustine, Aquinas, or Catholic social doctrine. They were written to limit government power, protect liberty of conscience, prohibit religious tests for public office, and forbid Congress from establishing religion—principles that historically stood in direct opposition to the religious-political system supported by the Roman Papacy.
Rubio’s appeal to the “common good” may sound harmless, but in Catholic political theology that phrase is often tied to a vision in which civil government is expected to promote moral and religious order. That is the danger. Once the state begins defining the “common good” through religious doctrine, liberty of conscience becomes threatened. America is not the fulfillment of Rome’s dreams. America was founded, in part, as a rejection of Old World Papal religious tyranny. The Constitution does not create a Catholic nation, a Protestant nation, or any church-state system. It creates a civil government that must not impose religious belief or worship by law.
And while Marco Rubio emphasizes Catholic suffering in early America, he entirely ignores Rome’s own bloody history on the shores of the United States in Jacksonville, FL. In 1565, Spanish Catholic forces destroyed the French Protestant settlement at Fort Caroline—located in present-day Jacksonville—and massacred French Huguenots in the events surrounding what later became known as the Matanzas Massacre. The National Park Service describes these events as the Catholic massacre of French Protestants in the present-day United States, which helped establish Rome’s control over Florida. [1] That history cannot simply be ignored while Rubio portrays Catholics solely as victims.
So the issue is not whether Catholics have lived, served, or contributed in America. They have. The issue is whether America’s founding story is now being revised to make Rome appear as the spiritual mother of the Republic. That claim is false, dangerous, and prophetic. America’s greatness was never built on submission to Rome but on the God-given principle that no earthly power has the right to command the conscience.
American history is being rewritten before our very eyes. Modern Catholic politicians and revisionist voices are presenting a polished and sanitized version of the United States—one that portrays America as a Catholic nation founded upon Catholic principles and destined to fulfill Rome’s vision. This narrative must be challenged, and true history must remain our teacher so that the dangers and abuses of the past are neither forgotten nor repeated.
Sources
[2] https://www.nps.gov/foma/learn/historyculture/the_massacre.htm
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