WASHINGTON (RNS) — After recent public sparring with Pope Francis and U.S. bishops, Vice President JD Vance struck a more conciliatory tone at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast on Friday (Feb. 28), seeking to alleviate tensions with the Catholic hierarchy while stopping short of abandoning views or policy positions that sparked the back and forth.
Speaking to a sprawling crowd of Catholics gathered at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, the typically strident Vance described himself as a “baby Catholic” — a reference to his being a more recent convert to Catholicism — and framed himself as an “imperfect” Christian.
“I try to be humble as best I can when I talk about the faith in public, because, of course, I’m not always going to get it right, and I don’t want my inadequacies in describing our faith to fall back on the faith itself,” said Vance, who converted to Catholicism and was baptized in 2019.
“So 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.”
The remarks were a stark departure for Vance, who often engages publicly in controversial issues and is known to swap insults online and on TV — including in his recent debates with Catholic prelates. Within a week of his inauguration, Vance chided the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, accusing them, without citing evidence, of resettling “illegal immigrants” and being too reliant on government funds. “Are they actually worried about their bottom line?” the vice president asked.
Bishops have since repeatedly rejected Vance’s assertion. In February, Bishop Mark Seitz of the Diocese of El Paso, who oversees USCCB’s committee on migration, called Vance’s comments “a tremendous mischaracterization.”
Bishop Mark Seitz at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in Orlando, Florida, Thursday, June 15, 2023. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)
More recently, Vance ended up in a back-and-forth with the pope himself. After the vice president insisted during an interview that the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies — which include allowing arrests of immigrants at churches and promises of mass deportations — were in line with a “Christian concept” of loving citizens of your own country before “the rest of the world,” he doubled down on the argument online, telling a critic on the social media platform X to Google the theological idea known as “ordo amoris” before adding the commentator has “an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130.”
A few days later, Pope Francis rejected the vice president’s interpretation in a letter to U.S. bishops, though he did not name Vance.
“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,” Francis wrote in his letter.
Vance addressed the controversies directly in his speech, saying, “You know, sometimes the bishops don’t like what I say,” before adding, “sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong.”
But Vance also appeared to suggest that while Catholics should not “ignore” clergy on matters of public policy, the vice president and other Catholics shouldn’t “obsess” over what they say.
Vice President JD Vance addresses the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast on Friday, Feb. 28, 2025, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)
“What I try to remind myself of is that 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,” 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 and in our social media.”
He added that he was “surprised” the pope criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies in his letter, and then posited the document wasn’t suited for today’s social media-driven discourse.
“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.
Vance closed his remarks with an impassioned celebration of the pontiff, who has been seriously ill, saying he and his children have prayed for the pope every day since Francis entered the hospital two weeks ago. Vance grew visibly emotional as he referenced a March 2020 homily by the pope at the beginning of the pandemic, saying the pope’s words were “incredibly meaningful” to him.
He then concluded by leading those gathered in a prayer for Francis.
“If the Holy Father can hear us, I hope he knows that there are thousands of faithful Catholics in this room and millions of faithful Catholics in this country who are praying for him as he weathers his particular storm,” Vance said.
Even with his conciliatory tone, however, tensions between the Trump administration and Catholic leaders are unlikely to subside soon.
In addition to Vance’s back-and-forth with the bishops and Pope Francis, the USCCB has filed suit against the Trump administration over the government’s decision to freeze funds for faith-based organizations involved in refugee resettlement. The lawsuit was referred to mediation on Monday, but on Thursday — the day before a scheduled hearing on the case — the government abruptly canceled its contract with the USCCB altogether and filed a notice in the case arguing the bishops no longer have standing.