Vatican City: After abandoning the Marines and starting his higher education, Vice President JD Vance went to atheism, struggling, eventually writing, with feelings of “irrelevance” in his faith and with “a desire for social acceptance between US elites.”
Vance, who later became Catholicism, this weekend made his second trip to the Vatican in less than a month. On the first visit, Vance met with Pope Francis in Easter, hours before he died. On Sunday, Vance directed an American delegation at the opening mass of the first Pope born in the United States, Leo XIV.
Both pontiffs, Francis during his papacy, Leo, in his previous service, such as Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, offered veiled but easily decipherable representatives of President Donald Trump and the worldview “America First” of Vance. Vance, something unusual for someone who enjoys the debate, has chosen politely dodge criticism. But the circumstances of recent weeks have paid unexpected attention in their religion, reinforcing their status as one of the world’s highest -ranking Catholics in political position.
In Sunday’s Mass, the vice president obtained a seat in the first row to the right of the Estrada, near the delegations of Italy and Peru, where the Pope is a naturalized citizen and served as Bishop and Archbishop.
In his homily, delivered in Italian, Leo spoke of “too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, fear of difference and an economic paradigm that exploits the resources of the earth and margins the poorest,” according to an English translation provided by the Vatican.
Vance and the second lady Usha Vance briefly greeted the Pope before leaving the Vatican on Sunday.
“Of course, the American Pope: the United States is very proud of him, very excited with him, and certainly our prayers go with him,” Vance said during the opening of a trilateral meeting on Sunday afternoon in Rome with the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
The White House was anxious to frame the visit of this weekend in historical terms.
“Pope Leo XIV is the first American Pope. Vice President Vance is the first Catholic convert to serve as vice president,” said Vance’s office when announcing the trip.
Vance is the second Catholic to serve as vice president, after Joe Biden, who became the second Catholic president, after John F. Kennedy. Biden grew in the Catholic Church, while Vance arrived in her as an adult. Joining Vance in Rome and the Vatican this weekend was Father Henry Stephan, the priest who baptized him in 2019.
After landing in Rome at sunset on Saturday night, Vance’s caravan first accelerated the basilica of St. Mary Major, where he and the second lady presented their respects in Francis’s tomb.
In February, Francis sent a letter to the US bishops that was seen by many as a scolding of Trump’s immigration policy in general and the justification of Vance in particular. Vance responded trying to calm any tension. Speaking at the National Breakfast of Catholic Prayer that same month, Vance said that, although Francisco’s criticism surprised him, the Pope was “fundamentally a person who cares about the flock of Christians under his leadership.”
The comment occurred after Vance, known for his combative online presence, lamented to his audience that the emergence of social networks was not healthy for religious discourse. (Vance excused Trump’s recent publication with an image of AI that represents the president as the Pope as a joke).
“We are not called Christians to become obsessed with each controversy on social networks that involves the Catholic Church,” Vance said. “Whether it involves a clergy or a bishop or the Holy Father, I think we must take a frankly page from the books of our grandparents, which respected our clergy, who looked for them guidance, but we will not become obsessed or fight for every word that came out of his mouth and entered social networks. I don’t think that is good.”
Vance gave a similar tone this month after Leo’s elections when the Pope caught attention to the stories he had shared on social networks as a cardinal who criticized Trump and Vance. While fighting with Leo’s policy in an interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, Vance offered a nuanced answer and said he prefers “not to play the politicization of the Pope’s game.”
However, despite all the advantage of Vance’s social networks, he telegraphed years before his vice presidency that the papacy is an authority that is reluctant to cross.
In a 2020 essay, he wrote about his conversion in the lamp, a Catholic magazine, Vance recalled to confront “a conservative Catholic writer about his criticisms of the Pope.” Vance said that “too many American Catholics have not been able to show an adequate deference to the papacy, treating the Pope as a political figure to be criticized or praised according to his whims.”
Vance’s conversion is a less fughed part of his past. In addition to the rehearsal of the lamp and the thoughts he shared with a conservative writer friend who attended his baptism, far from the public public, Vance has spoken in moderation about his spiritual journey.
At the Breakfast of Catholic prayer in February, Vance pointed out his interreligious marriage with Usha, who is Hindu, and how they are raising their three Catholic children while allowing them to decide when to be baptized. He said that his most exciting moment last November, the month in which he was elected vice president, it was when his 7 -year -old son chose to be baptized.
“One of the things I try to remember how a convert is that there are many things that I don’t know,” Vance said that day. “When I was a child, we used to call new converts to the Christians of the faith of faith. And I recognize that I am a Catholic baby, that there are things about the faith that I do not know. And that’s why I try to be humble how best I can when I speak publicly of faith, because of course I will not always do it well.”
