Vice President JD Vance on Friday addressed his relationship with the Catholic faith and Pope Francis at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast. Vance also discussed the elephant in the room about his relationship with the head of the Catholic Church, who nearly died this week.
“We are not called as Christians to obsess over every social media controversy that implicates the Catholic Church, whether it involves a clergy, or a bishop, or the Holy Father himself,” Vance told the breakfast attendees. He went on to say that Christians should not hold their religious leaders to the standards of social media influencers because they simply are not those types of people.
He also contended that religious leaders should be cognizant of how their words will be taken in the new age of social media.
“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,” Vance said.
The vice president then explained that he prays for Pope Francis every day since he heard of his illness and praised the pope for his clear care for “the flock of Christians under his leadership and the spiritual direction of the faith.”
Vance then shared an excerpt from a homily the pope had given during the coronavirus pandemic.
The vice president’s praise for the pope comes after he was criticized by the Catholic leader for defending the Trump administration’s enforcement of U.S. immigration law. Vance had justified the policies by citing the Christian principle of ordo amoris, the Latin term for the ordering of love to God, family, and country before strangers in distant lands.
Francis in a letter to the American bishops had directly criticized Vance’s theological justification for upholding American law, saying, “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 breakfast, which was celebrating its 20th anniversary, featured several prominent Catholics, including the papal ambassador to the United States, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, Mexican actor Eduardo Verástegui, and the popular Hallow meditation app cofounder Alessandro DiSanto.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., received the Christifideles Laici Award award for steadfast pro-life advocacy as a member of Congress for over 40 years. Smith noted that he had met his wife in the pro-life movement.
“Who would have thought the pro-life movement would be a dating service?” he quipped.
The highlight of the breakfast, however, was Vance, who had attended last year’s breakfast as a young senator from Ohio. He noted that he was the first Catholic convert to become vice president.
Vance touted the Trump administration’s approach to the pro-life issue in sharp contrast to the presidency of Joe Biden.
“Now we know the last administration liked to throw people in jail for silently praying outside [abortion] clinics. We know that they liked to harass pro-life fathers of seven, very often Catholic fathers for participating in the pro-life movement. And we know that the last administration wanted to protect taxpayer-funded abortion right up to the moment of birth. And on every single one of those issues, in 30 short days, Donald J. Trump has gone in the exact opposite direction,” Vance told the approximately 1,400 attendees, many in religious orders, at the breakfast.
Vance also critiqued past administrations that had implemented foreign policy with major unintended consequences for Christian communities in the Middle East, perhaps most notably the Christians living in Iraq.
“It is our foreign misadventures that lead to the eradications of historic Christian communities all over the world,” Vance said.
He contended that bringing peace to the Middle East would help the historic Christian communities living there who had so often faced negative consequences because of American intervention.
Vance also promised that the Trump administration would be the biggest defender of religious liberty and the rights of conscience all around the world. His remarks echoed the speech he gave at the International Religious Freedom Summit earlier this month.
Vance said that the common good of every citizen of the United States was his priority. “I think that what the Catholic Church calls me to do is, to say that as the stock market is doing OK, but people are literally dying and losing years off of their life, then we have to do better as a country,” he said. The vice president noted that as great as winning the November election had been, he had been most excited for his eldest son, who had chosen to be baptized that month.
Vance asked for Catholic leaders to communicate to the new administration both positive and negative feedback regarding its policies, noting that he now lives in a bubble as a result of his Secret Service protection.
The vice president stressed that the administration’s door was always open, even if they would inevitably disagree with religious leaders on some issues. After Vance’s speech concluded, he received a standing ovation from the audience.