Vice President JD Vance said he was surprised to hear of Pope Francis’s criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policy while speaking at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Feb. 28.
Vance also said he believes that the pontiff is a man who deeply cares about the spiritual direction of the faith and the world’s Christians.
“I will always remember the Holy Father as a great pastor, as a man who can speak the truth, the faith, in a very profound way at a moment of great crisis,” Vance said. He recalled a sermon of hope that the pope delivered in March 2020 at the height of the pandemic in an empty St. Peter’s Square, likening it to the gospel in which Jesus calmed the sea after his terrified disciples awakened him during a storm.
Vance, the first Catholic convert to serve as vice president, asked fellow Catholics to say a prayer that he and his family had been praying daily for the pope ever since he was admitted to the hospital.
Pope Francis has criticized President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and condemned mass deportations.
“The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” he said in a Feb. 10 letter.
Vance had argued that his administration’s immigration policy was aligned with his Catholic faith, citing “Ordo Amoris,” a centuries-old teaching that suggests a hierarchy of how one is supposed to love, justifying the needs and concerns of the immediate family before those of strangers.
Pope Francis appeared to correct Vance’s understanding of the concept in his letter.
“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” he wrote. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
The vice president also discussed using social media to respond to messages and criticism from the pope, bishops, and other religious leaders.
“Sometimes the bishops don’t like what I say,” Vance said. “I’m sure, by the way, sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re wrong. My goal is not to litigate when I’m right and when they’re wrong or vice versa. My goal is to maybe articulate the way that I think about being a Christian in public life.”
Vance said that he believes Christians are not called to obsess over social media controversies involving the Catholic Church, clergy, “or the Holy Father himself,” he said.
“I think that we should frankly take a page out of the books of our grandparents who respected our clergy, who looked to them for guidance, but didn’t obsess and fight over every single word that came out of their mouth.”
Vance said that the clergy are important spiritual leaders with a 2,000-year-old duty to speak on the issues of the day, but that they are now faced with the challenges of social media, and it is just as important for the Church’s clergy to recognize that as it is for lay people.
“I think it’s incumbent upon our religious leaders to recognize that in the era of social media, people will hang on every single word that they utter, even if that wasn’t their intention, and even if a given declaration wasn’t meant for consumption in the social media age,” he said.
The vice president’s speech touched upon his conversion to the faith and the emotional declaration that his 7-year-old son’s baptism was far more significant than winning the election in November 2024.
He stated that the administration’s door was open to feedback from the nation’s faithful.
“I'll make this commitment to you in front of God, and in front of all those television cameras back there, that we will always listen to people of faith and people of conscience in the United States of America,” Vance said. “You have an open door to the Trump administration, even and especially, maybe, when you disagree with us.
“So, please use that opportunity to communicate with us when we get things right, but also when we get things wrong.”
