How JD Vance, a ‘Baby Catholic,’ Stumbled into a Clash with the Pope

The Washington Post

12:51 JST, April 12, 2025

Only three Catholics have won the presidency or vice presidency. For the first two, Democrats John F. Kennedy and Joe Biden, faith was a muted note in their public lives – a source of pride to millions of American Catholics but rarely invoked as a direct influence on policy.

The third, Vice President JD Vance, a Republican, has launched his current career as the nation’s most prominent elected Catholic in a very different way. In less than three months, Vance has made a string of unusual forays into the fraught borderland between religion and politics, castigating the hierarchy of his own church and defending President Donald Trump’s “America First” nationalism through appeals to ancient Christian texts.

Vance’s pronouncements have divided his co-religionists and inflamed long-smoldering divisions within the church. In February, Pope Francis issued a remarkable letter to U.S. bishops that included a rebuke of Vance’s public theologizing. But the vice president has equally staunch defenders among conservative American Catholics who have repeatedly criticized the current papacy.

The entire episode demonstrates how Catholicism’s place in American political culture has changed dramatically over the last half-century. When Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he sought to defuse suspicions that he held secret allegiances to Rome, declaring his commitment to “an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”

Since then, anti-Catholic bias has largely receded from U.S. politics, and the faith has grown popular with a new generation on the right – including Vance – who see it as a bulwark against corrosive social and cultural change. The nation’s first Catholic president may have downplayed his religion, but its current vice president does not hesitate to cite papal encyclicals at tech conferences, or to back up his social media arguments with quotations from long-dead saints.

“It’s a huge win to have a major public figure use this kind of language,” said R.R. Reno, a former theology professor and editor of the conservative religious journal First Things. “You then can pivot and debate about whether he uses it properly, and what the real meaning is. But to even have that debate in public is quite a remarkable turn of events.”

Yet the early collision between Vatican authorities and the White House has also stirred profound unease among some Catholics who say their faith is being co-opted in the service of nationalist policies contradicted by the church’s social teaching.

“If you’re a Catholic, you don’t just choose your own adventure, so to speak. You don’t just take your own interpretation of the Bible and put that over and against what the church teaches,” said Dawn Eden Goldstein, a Catholic writer who holds advanced degrees in canon law and theology and who has criticized Vance. “That is very dangerous. But that is a practice of people who want to alter the faith to suit their political agenda, rather than looking to the faith to shape their approach to politics.”

Vance is not the first Catholic politician to wrestle with tensions between his party’s platform and the teachings of the Holy See. Two of the nation’s most powerful Democrats – Biden and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California), the former House speaker – have often been attacked for their support of abortion rights that are rejected by the church. In 2022 the archbishop of San Francisco banned Pelosi from receiving Communion over the issue, although Pelosi has said she disregards the ban and has appealed her case to the Vatican.

But the latest conflict has been more explosive, revolving around a topic that is central both to Vance’s political career and to Francis’s papacy: immigration.

Since Vance began running for the Senate in 2021, renouncing his previous attacks on Trump and rebranding himself as a MAGA stalwart, calls to restrict immigration have been at the core of his message. Vance asserts that failed security at the southern border of the United States is responsible for “more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” During the 2024 presidential campaign, he falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Ohio of abducting and eating other people’s pets.

Francis, by contrast, made his first trip as pope in 2013 to Lampedusa, an Italian island that had become a way station for people trying to reach Europe by sea from North Africa. The newly elected pontiff celebrated Mass there at an altar made from a boat and delivered a homily in which he begged God’s forgiveness for the “indifference” shown to the suffering of immigrants who he said were “looking for a better place for themselves and their families.”

These radical differences have come to the fore as Trump promises to enact mass deportations. Relations between Vatican City and Washington have been further strained as the Trump administration has forced the closure of a Catholic resettlement program for refugees with millions of dollars in funding cuts. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is suing the administration over those cuts.

The dispute is also part of a larger ideological rift that has grown acute during the Francis era between the church’s power center in Rome and some Catholic intellectuals in the United States. These “postliberal” thinkers – a number of whom are, like Vance, adult converts to the faith – question the philosophical tenets of secular democracies and argue for expanding Christianity’s influence over government.

Vance’s office declined to comment for this report.

“It’s absurd that the Washington Post thinks Vice President Vance owes them an explanation for his Catholic faith,” Taylor Van Kirk, the vice president’s press secretary, said in a statement.

Speaking recently at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, Vance – who converted to Catholicism in 2019 – struck conciliatory notes as he acknowledged the uproar over some of his comments.

“I recognize very much that I am a baby Catholic,” he said, adding, “If you ever hear me pontificating about the Catholic faith, please recognize it comes from a place of deep belief, but it also comes from a place of not always knowing everything all the time.”

But he also signaled an unwillingness to back down in his dispute with Francis over the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

“My goal here is not to litigate with him or any other clergy member about who’s right and who’s wrong,” Vance said. “You obviously know my views, and I will speak to them consistently, because I think that I have to do it, because it serves the best interests of the American people.”

‘Look in the mirror’

During last year’s campaign, Vance was criticized – sometimes from the right – for the GOP presidential ticket’s departures from Catholic teaching. Some assailed him for the Trump campaign’s opposition to a national abortion ban, as well as its support for access to the abortion pill mifepristone and in vitro fertilization. The church opposes the latter procedure because it involves the destruction of unused human embryos, among other reasons.

In an August 2024 interview with the New York Post, Vance said such compromises were necessary in a democratic society.

“It certainly influences how I think about issues,” he said of church teaching. “But I think that there are a lot of things the Catholic Church teaches that, frankly, Americans would just never go for.”

But it was not until Vance assumed the vice presidency that tensions between the church’s extensive social precepts and Trump administration policies intensified.

In January, the U.S. bishops’ conference criticized Trump’s decision to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to enter churches and schools. In his first interview after the inauguration, Vance harshly criticized the bishops, saying that as a Catholic he was “heartbroken” by their opposition. He also suggested they were motivated not by genuine concern for migrants but by the desire to preserve federal funding for their aid services.

“I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit,” Vance said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?”

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York called Vance’s remarks “scurrilous,” “very nasty” and “not true.”

“You want to come look at our audits, which are scrupulously done? You think we make money caring for the immigrants?” Dolan said on his weekly radio show. “We’re losing it hand over fist … we’re not in a moneymaking business.”

The Catholic writer and podcaster Gloria Purvis said she considered Vance’s remarks part of a disturbing tendency he has shown to demonize others in search of political dividends.

“He did that to the Haitians. He did that to the bishops. It is a bald-faced lie meant, in my opinion, to separate the sheep from the shepherds,” Purvis said. “If you’re not sensitive, you’d miss what he’s implanting in people’s minds: ‘I’m the devout Catholic. They’re the moneygrubbing whores.’ ”

Yet Vance’s criticism became a rallying cry among like-minded conservatives. Calls to “defund the bishops” echoed over the social media platform X. Kevin D. Roberts, a Catholic and president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, argued that the bishops’ conference should voluntarily reject federal funds for aiding migrants.

“The Church served the poor and the downtrodden for thousands of years before we were on the American taxpayer’s dime, and we can serve them even better for the next thousand years if we get off the federal government’s payroll,” Roberts wrote in First Things.

‘The true ordo amoris’

Vance’s scuffle with the bishops was just the prelude to a larger controversy that began several days later, when he again appeared on television with Fox News host Sean Hannity. During the interview, Vance riffed on what he said was the left’s “deranged” prioritization of illegal immigrants over American citizens, then pivoted in an unexpected direction.

“There’s this old-school – and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way – that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance said. “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders.”

Rory Stewart, a former Tory member of the British Parliament, responded critically to a clip of Vance’s comment on X, saying it was “less Christian and more pagan tribal.”

The vice president countered by assailing Stewart’s mental aptitude, writing on X, “the problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130.”

He also brought unlikely notoriety to a Latin phrase.

“Just google ‘ordo amoris,’” Vance wrote.

The term is found in “The City of God,” a famous work by the 4th-century bishop Augustine, who instructs his readers to cultivate virtue by placing God first in an “order of love” in which any kind of “temporal, carnal, and lower kind of good” has lesser priority.

Years before Vance brought it to X, the concept was invoked as a justification for nationalism by right-wing Protestants. In a 2022 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, for instance, William Wolfe – a Southern Baptist and an official in the first Trump administration – said Augustine’s idea was “crucial” to a Christian understanding of America First policies.

Theology experts differ over the merit of this interpretation.

James Orr, an associate professor of the philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge, said Vance was correct in asserting that an emphasis on first doing good to those closest to us, such as relatives and neighbors, is an “old-school” idea running through both Christian and pre-Christian traditions.

“We may wish it were otherwise. We may want to all be naturally wired to be effective altruists, and just think of every single human being as an equal object of our moral concern,” Orr said. “But it’s just not how we are.”

But Stephen Pope, a professor of moral theology at Boston College, said Vance’s reading ignores complexities in the thought of Christian philosophers. For example, while the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote that “we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected with us,” he also argued that we should sometimes “succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one’s own father, if he is not in such urgent need.”

More important, Pope said, Catholics are supposed to take their cues on such questions not from isolated quotations but from the robust body of church social teaching that has been developed over centuries. That tradition is unequivocal in its emphasis on charity toward immigrants and others at the margins of society, he said.

“If he wants to say, ‘This is my personal political view,’ or ‘This is the MAGA view,’ go ahead,” Pope said of Vance. “But he shouldn’t claim it’s Christian, because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

In early February, days before he was hospitalized with severe bronchitis, the 88-year-old head of the Catholic Church delivered an extraordinary statement. In a letter to American bishops, Francis emphasized the duty of the faithful to show compassion to migrants, writing that “even a cursory examination of the Church’s social doctrine emphatically shows” that Jesus himself had endured “the difficult experience of being expelled from his own land because of an imminent risk to his life.”

“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis wrote, in what appeared to be a pointed reference to Vance’s statements. He invoked the Gospels’ parable of the Good Samaritan, writing that “the true ordo amoris” involves “love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Spiritual authority

Stewart, the former British politician who quarreled with Vance on X, said that as an Episcopalian he isn’t necessarily obligated to view Francis as a spiritual authority. Nevertheless, he said, it was nice to have the pope take his side in an argument over Christ’s message.

“I think it’s extremely weird when politicians try to speak on behalf of Jesus,” said Stewart, who hosts a popular political podcast and is a professor at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. “We’re not theologians. We’re not priests. And I think it’s a grossly arrogant and peculiar thing to do to try to speak in the name of God.”

Liberal democracies have historically been skeptical of the overlapping of religious authority and political power. But some of Vance’s strongest supporters in the Catholic Church come from a vanguard of writers and academics who assert that this skepticism is misplaced.

These thinkers argue there is a deep conflict between Christianity and a “liberal order” that emphasizes individual freedoms over the shared spiritual and moral values of premodern societies. They often cite as a model Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, whose agenda for a “Christian Europe” has included fierce anti-migrant policies, the banning of adoption by same-sex couples and generous tax incentives for large families.

C.C. Pecknold, an associate professor of theology at Catholic University of America and co-founder and editor of the Postliberal Order Substack page, said the controversy over the vice president’s statements is just a skirmish in a larger clash of worldviews.

“I think it’s unrelievedly good news to have public officials returning to God, returning to classical wisdom, returning to Church teaching which has illuminated many nations long before ours ever existed,” Pecknold wrote in an email. “This doesn’t require theocracy, or handing the state over to the Church, but it does mean that secularism has failed miserably. It’s time to return to the normal give-and-take of governance that makes regular public reference to God.”

Vance has spoken admiringly of postliberal thinkers, and his elevation to the summit of politics has brought their ideas to a wider audience. But no senior members of the American clergy have publicly endorsed the postliberal vision, according to James Patterson, an associate professor of politics at Ave Maria University who is writing a book about the movement and its history.

Patterson, a critic of the postliberals, said that has left some conservative Catholics in the United States looking to the vice president – now the nation’s most prominent, and most frequently televised, member of the faith – as their de facto leader.

The pope’s unusual letter, he added, was probably intended not only as a judgment resolving a theological dispute but as a reminder to his American flock of where power in the church truly lies.

“This is the pope showing that he is the spiritual authority,” Patterson said, “and not Vance.”