Vice-President JD Vance dismissed new Pope Leo XIV— formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost—criticism of him and Donald Trump.
“I try not to play the politicization of the Pope game,” Vance told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday. “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.”
After Prevost was elected pope Thursday, his social media account with posts criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration policies went viral.
Then-Cardinal Prevost retweeted criticism of Trump and President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele’s response to the deportation of El Salvadorian national Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a resident of Maryland.
In 2015, Prevost quoted Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of the New York Archdiocese, from a Washington Post article, posting on his X account at the time: “Cardinal Dolan: Why Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is so problematic.”
One post from Feb. 3, 2025, pointed to an article in the National Catholic Reporter titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, has routinely invoked his faith to defend the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies.
“There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritise the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that,” Vance told Fox News in January.
Pope Leo XIV’s predecessor Pope Francis also criticized Vance for his comments at the time.
While MAGA attacks the new pope over his past social media criticism, Vance took a different approach, arguing that the church is “bigger than politics.”
“My attitude is, you know, the Church is about saving souls, and about spreading the Gospel,” he said. “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.”
