VATICAN CITY — After leaving the Marines and beginning his higher education, Vice President JD Vance drifted into atheism — struggling, he would eventually write, with feelings of “irrelevance” in his faith and with “a desire for social acceptance among American elites.”
Vance, who later converted to Catholicism, this weekend made his second trip to the Vatican in less than a month. On the first visit, Vance met with Pope Francis on Easter, hours before he died. On Sunday, Vance led a U.S. delegation at the inaugural Mass of the first U.S.-born pope, Leo XIV.
Both pontiffs — Francis during his papacy, Leo in his prior service as Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost — offered veiled but easily decipherable rebukes of President Donald Trump and Vance’s “America first” worldview. Vance, somewhat uncharacteristically for someone who so relishes debate, has chosen to politely sidestep criticism. But the circumstances of the last few weeks have put an unexpected spotlight on his religion, reinforcing his status as one of the world’s highest-ranking Catholics in political office.
At Sunday’s Mass, the vice president scored a prime seat in the first row to the right of the dais, near delegations from Italy and Peru, where the pope is a naturalized citizen and served as a bishop and archbishop.
In his homily, delivered in Italian, Leo spoke of “too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, the fear of difference, and an economic paradigm that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalizes the poorest,” according to an English translation provided by the Vatican.
Vance and 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 thrilled with him, and certainly our prayers go with him,” Vance said during the opening of a trilateral meeting Sunday afternoon in Rome with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The White House was eager to frame this weekend’s visit in historic terms.
“Pope Leo XIV is the first American Pope. Vice President Vance is the first Catholic convert to serve as Vice President,” Vance’s office emphasized when announcing the trip.
Vance is the second Catholic to serve as vice president, after Joe Biden, who went on to become the second Catholic president, after John F. Kennedy. Biden grew up in the Catholic Church, while Vance came to it as an adult. Joining Vance in Rome and at 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 motorcade first sped to the Basilica of St. Mary Major, where he and the second lady paid their respects at Francis’ tomb.
In February, Francis sent a letter to U.S. bishops that was viewed by many as a scolding of Trump’s immigration policy in general and of Vance’s justification of it in particular. Vance responded by trying to defuse any tensions. Speaking at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast that same month, Vance said that while Francis’ criticism surprised him, the pope was “fundamentally a person who cares about the flock of Christians under his leadership.”
The remark came after Vance, who is known for his combative online presence, lamented to his audience that the rise of social media was unhealthy for religious discourse. (Vance excused Trump’s recent post featuring an AI image depicting the president as the pope as a joke.)
“We are not called as Christians to obsess over every social media controversy that implicates the Catholic Church,” Vance said. “Whether it involves a clergy or a bishop or the Holy Father himself, 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 or fight over every single word that came out of their mouth and entered social media. I don’t think that’s good.”
Vance struck a similar tone this month after Leo’s election as pope drew attention to stories he had shared on social media as a cardinal that were critical of Trump and Vance. While wrestling with Leo’s politics 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 game.”
Yet for all of Vance’s social media bluster, he telegraphed years before his vice presidency that the papacy is an authority that he is reluctant to cross.
In a 2020 essay he wrote about his conversion in The Lamp, a Catholic journal, Vance recalled confronting “a conservative Catholic writer about his criticism of the pope.” Vance asserted that “too many American Catholics have failed to show proper deference to the papacy, treating the pope as a political figure to be criticized or praised according to their whims.”
Vance’s conversion is a less plumbed part of his past. Aside from The Lamp essay and thoughts he shared with a conservative writer friend who attended his baptism, away from public audiences, Vance has talked rather sparingly about his spiritual journey.
At the Catholic prayer breakfast in February, Vance noted his interfaith marriage to Usha, who is Hindu, and how they are raising their three children Catholic while allowing them to decide when to be baptized. He said his most exciting moment last November — the month he was elected vice president — was when his 7-year-old son chose to be baptized.
“One of the things that I try to remind myself of as a convert is that there is a lot I don’t know,” Vance said that day. “When I was a kid, we used to call new converts to the faith baby Christians. And I recognize very much that I am a baby Catholic, that there are things about the faith that I don’t know. And so I try to be humble as best I can when I talk about the faith publicly, because of course I’m not always going to get it right.”
