Vice President JD Vance has launched a fresh attack on the Vatican in a new book on his faith.
In his memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Catholic convert Vance details his encounter with church officials in April last year.
In extracts published by The Washington Post, Vance wrote that the Vatican’s secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin discussed the topic of migration with him during their meeting.
However, the vice president was not pleased with the tone of the conversation and described it as “unsettling”.
“Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes,” Vance wrote.
According to Vance, Parolin acknowledged that the U.S. has the right to control its own borders while encouraging the Trump administration to treat migrants humanely.
The vice president, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, went on to claim that the diplomats “never specified” exactly what aspects of the administration’s tough immigration policies they took issue with, “out of a desire to be, well, diplomatic”.
Taking another swipe at the Vatican’s top officials, Vance claimed that he was “struck that one of the few institutions with the moral authority and global perspective to address the migration question seemed so afraid of saying something controversial that it chose, effectively, to say nothing at all.”
Vance’s meeting preceded a face-to-face visit with Pope Francis on Easter morning, 24 hours before the pontiff passed away.
The vice president explained there were concerns about the meeting given the Pope’s health, while Vatican and American diplomats alike were “clearly worried” whether it “would be seen as a snub” if it fell through.
While attending a Good Friday Mass in St Peter’s Basilica, a priest pulled the vice president aside and said that the pope had yet to make a decision on whether he was able to attend.
Vance responded by saying that the pope “should feel under no pressure to see me”, but later received a text message on Easter morning informing him that Francis was able to meet. When they finally did, Vance said the pontiff was “more fragile than I realized.”
The vice president later called his wife and Second Lady Usha Vance from the car, describing Francis as being in “very bad shape” but added that he had been “very kind”, giving gifts for their children.
After arriving in India, Vance was informed of Francis’s death by one of his Catholic staffers.
“We had different jobs, and I preferred his specific exhortations to the vagueness I had encountered during our Vatican meeting,” Vance wrote. “Better to have an honest conversation than one masked by cliches.”
Vance has urged Francis’s successor, American-born Pope Leo XIV, to “be careful” when he talks about matters of theology while speaking at an event in April.
He also encouraged Leo, who has criticized the administration’s immigration policy, to focus on “matters of morality.”
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