Catholic convert JD Vance was put on the spot during a Fox News interview over President Donald Trump’s deranged attack on Pope Leo XIV.
Trump set off a firestorm Monday by lashing out at the Vicar of Christ in a 334-word Truth Social broadside, branding the Chicago-born pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” He also claimed credit for Leo’s elevation to the papacy and shared an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus.
A defiant Leo declared in response, “I have no fear of the Trump administration.”
That put Vance, 41, in an awkward position when he was asked on Special Report with Bret Baier about his thoughts “as a Catholic” about Trump’s papal feud.
Repeatedly calling the matter not “newsworthy,” the self-described “baby Catholic” insisted that Trump was “posting a joke” when he shared the since-deleted AI image of himself as Jesus.
Vance added, “He took it down because he recognized that a lot of people weren’t understanding his humor in that case.”
Trump, however, claimed earlier Monday that he had thought the blasphemous AI image was depicting him “as a doctor, making people better.”
Vance lavished praise on Trump for not being “filtered” before arguing that it’s “totally reasonable” that the president has “disagreements” with Leo, who has publicly criticized Trump and his acolytes for their immigration policy and warmongering.
“I certainly think that in some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of, you know, what’s going on in the Catholic Church, and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy,” said Vance, who has frequently touted his midlife conversion to Catholicism.
“But when they are in conflict, they are in conflict. I don’t worry about it too much, Bret,” he continued, trying to downplay the escalating rift between his boss and the spiritual leader of more than a billion Catholics like him. “I think it’s a natural thing. I’m sure it will happen in the future, and it’s not that big of a thing that it happened in the past.”
Vance claimed, “We can respect the pope, we certainly have a good relationship with the Vatican”—even though the Free Press reported last week that top Pentagon brass summoned top Vatican diplomat Cardinal Christophe Pierre for a meeting in January to tell him the United States has the military power to do “whatever it wants” and that Leo “better take its side.”
The vice president was ridiculed online last week after admitting that he did not know who Pierre was, until a reporter clarified that Pierre had been Leo’s ambassador to the United States.
“Oh, okay, okay, I do. I’ve met him before,” Vance, who converted in 2019, after being raised in a loosely evangelical, non-denominational tradition and later identifying as an atheist in college. “Sorry. I just didn’t remember the name.”
Earlier this month, Vance was also mocked for announcing a forthcoming memoir about becoming a Catholic—featuring a United Methodist church on its cover.
Vance announced the 304-page memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, on April 1, posting on X that it captured his “personal journey” to Catholicism after a period of atheism. The photogenic rural church pictured on the cover is actually Mount Zion Church in Elk Creek, Virginia—a congregation of the United Methodist Church’s Holston Conference on Mt. Zion Road, with an average Sunday attendance of 17.
