Vice President JD Vance tempered any burgeoning feud the new Pope might have with the Trump administration saying that he attempts to separate politics from church.
Speaking on the “Hugh Hewitt Show” on Friday, Vance dismissed the unconfirmed reports that a social media account belonging to Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, had reposted an opinion article criticizing the Trump administration’s stance on immigration and how Vance views the policy through his Catholic faith. The article was reposted in mid-April and used the illegal immigrants moved by the Trump administration to El Salvador as an example of their callous policy. “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed?” the op-ed that Prevost reposted reads.
On Thursday, the cardinal electors of the Catholic Church elected Chicago native Prevost, 69, as the first American-born Pope to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. Prevost chose Leo XIV as his papal name.
“I try not to play the politicization of the Pope game,” Vance told Hewitt. “I’m sure he’s going to say a lot of things that I love. I’m sure he’ll say some things that I disagree with, but I’ll continue to pray for him and the Church despite it all and through it all.”
This week’s alleged disagreement isn’t the first time Vance has crossed paths with the Vatican. In February, the late Pope Francis appeared to have called out Vance and his use of the Catholic term “ordo amoris,” as first reported by The Catholic New Agency. In a January post on X, Vance, a Catholic, wrote, “Just google ‘ordo amoris’ to justify putting country first.” Vance added in a previous interview, “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.”
“And my attitude is, you know, the Church is about saving souls, and about spreading the Gospel,” Vance said to Hewitt. “And yeah, it’s going to touch public policy from time to time as all human institutions do, but that’s not really what it’s about.”
Vance isn’t the first Trump administration official to run counter with the Vatican over the issue of illegal immigration. Border Czar Tom Homan advised Francis to “fix your own home and leave the border stuff to us” after the late Pope warned that deporting people due to their legal status “will end badly.”
Vance continued to downplay any feud with the Holy Father and chose to use a baseball analogy to sum up their differences. “I had a friend of mine that had a pretty funny take on this. He said, ‘If Pope Leo really is a Chicago White Sox fan, then he’s already actually faced the stress of martyrdom multiple times,’ so maybe we have a real winner in the new Holy Father,” Vance concluded.
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