Sec. Marco Rubio spoke with reporters on Thursday in Turkey, where he was asked about his opinion on Pope Leo.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Can you speak to the outlook of the American Pope, how important this visit is?
00:05And what's your read on Pope Leo so far as a practicing Catholic?
00:08Can you tell what story John's working with?
00:11I've got 12 years of Catholic education.
00:13Yeah, I don't, listen, guys, I mean, maybe I just analyze this different.
00:17I'll tell you from, I'm a Roman Catholic.
00:19I believe that the Pope is the successor of Peter,
00:22appointed through apostolic succession and the intervention of the Holy Spirit through the cardinals.
00:30And the one thing I can tell you is that the only institution that was around 2,000 years ago
00:35that's still around is the Catholic Church, the universal church, and I have faith in that system.
00:40We've had very good popes, we've had bad popes, but we still have a church.
00:44And I think it speaks to the strength of the church and to the validity of it.
00:49And as a Roman Catholic, I believe it's because the Pope, the Bishop of Rome,
00:54is the inheritor of the power that was left to Peter by Jesus himself
01:00and has been passed down through the generations.
01:03No other human institution would have been able to survive the ups and downs the church has faced.
01:07What's kept it is that he's the rock, and upon that rock he built the church.
01:10That's what I believe deeply, and that's how I analyze the situation.
01:15I just don't view him as a political leader.
01:18He may have political opinions, and the church has social teachings,
01:20which have informed much of what I say and have done in politics, especially in the last few years.
01:25I gave a speech at Catholic University in 2018 that was built on an encyclical by a Pope Leo.
01:33But again, I don't view the papacy as a political office.
01:36I view it as a spiritual one.
01:37Okay, thank you.
01:39Thank you very much.