Vice President Vance deftly de-escalates conflict with Pope Francis
By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 02, 2025
“What the heck did you guys feed Vance for breakfast?”
That was my wife, texting me last Friday, the day of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast. I was one of the 1,400 breakfast attendees who had the privilege of hearing a stellar speech by JD Vance, the first Catholic convert ever to be elected Vice President. Later that same day, Vice President Vance and President Trump threw down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the media during a Q and A in the Oval Office.
We will save the Ukraine stuff for another time. Today, I want to address the worldview present in Vance’s speech. Call it Vanceism. Or the Vance Doctrine. A more specific subset of the populist nationalism that many have struggled to define since Trump first came down the escalator in 2015—and a more Catholic one. To the extent that Trumpism is a hodgepodge of often conflicting ideological tendencies—tech bro transhumanism mixed in with anti-woke libertarianism and Manosphere podcasters—Vanceism is the particular strain of Trumpism that Catholics should be rooting for.
Vance began his speech by rightly touting the many accomplishments for pro-lifers and Catholics that the new Administration has already had. But also by saying this in passing:
…while you’re certainly not always going to agree with everything that we do in President Trump’s administration…
Let’s stop there for a moment before proceeding to the good stuff. Vance did not name those disagreements. But we should. Up until February 18th, pro-lifers could have drawn a distinction between the bad things the Trump-Vance campaign had said and the good things the Trump-Vance Administration has done (see leftist tears here). But with his Feb. 18th executive order on IVF, it seems that Trump intends to carry out the bad promises too. And no, that Trump upset liberal media outlets by not magically making IVF free with one stroke of his executive pen is small comfort. More disturbing still is the line in this story:
A White House official told NOTUS Tuesday that this order was the Trump administration’s ‘first step’ toward realizing that promise [to mandate IVF coverage].
As the Administration moves forward on this issue, I hope they will consider these 14 Questions for the White House on IVF.
Now, to the good stuff:
One of the most important parts of President Trump’s policy, and where I think President Trump’s policy is most in accord with Christian social teaching and with the Catholic faith, is that more than any president of my lifetime, President Trump has pursued a path of peace. And we very often, I think, ignore the way in which our foreign policy is either an instrument or an impediment to people all over the world being able to practice their faith.
If the arc of your political journey has been anything like mine, you know what Vance means. ISIS wiping out indigenous Christian communities in the Middle East ten years ago—the indirect result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq another ten years before that—helped turn me toward a Pat Buchanan-like direction on U.S. foreign policy. Even more so, the way the neocons of the early 21st century were ambivalent about—or supportive of—the redefinition of marriage—and the rise of cancel culture and wokeness that came in its wake. Some neocons did oppose it, to be sure. But by the mid 2010s, it was clear that their opposition was mere window dressing compared to their real passion: an interventionist U.S. foreign policy, whatever the costs.
Vance’s deviation from pre-Trump Republican orthodoxy doesn’t stop there. He hit again on a theme that I noticed in his earlier March for Life speech:
The second thing that I take from my Catholic faith is a recognition that the deepest and most important things are not material. They’re not GDP. They’re not the numbers that we see in the stock market. The real measure of health in a society is the safety and stability and the health of our families, and of our people. We are in the business, in President Trump’s administration, of producing prosperity, but that prosperity is a means to an end. And that end is the flourishing, hopefully, of the life of every single citizen in the United States of America.
You didn’t hear a lot about prosperity being a means to an end in the pre-Trump GOP. Prosperity was frequently treated as an end in itself. The Democrats understood better than the GOP that leaders must speak to the “deepest things”—even if, in the case of the Democrats, it was often the wrong deepest things. But you can’t beat something with nothing. For the first time since the 1980s, the GOP is addressing the deepest things thanks to Vanceism.
Finally, Vance pulled off something amazing in his—and the Administration’s—difficult relationship with Pope Francis. Vance did with the Pope what he did with Tim Walz. I don’t mean that in a snarky way. I mean Vance flipped the script by playing against type. He was respectful and classy and acknowledged the role of the episcopate in addressing public policy. He also admitted his own imperfections:
I recognize very much that I am a “baby Catholic”—that there are things about the faith that I don’t know. So I try to be humble as best I can when I talk about the faith and publicly, because of course, I’m not always going to get it right… But 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…. Sometimes we should let this stuff play out a little bit and try to live our faith as best we can under the dictates of our faith and under the dictates of our spiritual leaders, but not hold them to the standards of social media influencers because they’re not.
A masterstroke of de-escalation. Bravo, Mr. Vice President.
Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.
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