A CATHOLIC WORLDVIEW

Vice President JD Vance’s wife, Usha, a practicing Hindu, once told him that she believed his 2019 conversion to Catholicism “was good for you.” 

And at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington last week, Vance gave Catholics a window into his worldview, one of being a Catholic convert in public life, and said his goal in whatever public office he has held was to promote the “common good of every citizen in the United States.”

“We are in the business of 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,” Vance said. “What the Catholic Church calls me to do is to say that if the stock market is OK and people are literally dying and losing years off of their lives, then we have to do better as a country. 

“Catholicism, Christianity at its root, teaches our public officials to care about the deep things, the important things, the protection of the unborn, the flourishing of our children and the health and the sanctity of our marriages. Yes, we care about prosperity, but we care about prosperity so we can promote the common good of every citizen in the United States of America.”

Vance added he was “surprised” by Pope Francis’ criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, but said he is praying for the pontiff’s recovery amid his hospitalization. Vance, who recently found himself at odds with the Catholic Church’s leaders on issues including migration and the theological concept of the “ordo amoris,” also took a conciliatory tone during the Feb. 28 breakfast.

“While yes, I was certainly surprised when he criticized our immigration policy in the way that he has, I also know that the pope — I believe that the pope — is fundamentally a person who cares about the flock of Christians under his leadership, and he’s a man who cares about the spiritual direction of the faith,” Vance said.

Vance also said Pope Francis’ 2020 “urbi et orbi” prayer for the world amid the COVID-19 pandemic has been a source of inspiration for him then and now, even reading from an excerpt of the pope’s comments at that event.

“That is how I will always remember the Holy Father,” Vance said, “as a man who could speak the truth, the faith, in a very profound way at a moment of great crisis.” Vance also led those in attendance in prayer for the pontiff’s recovery.

The Ohio-born Vance rarely attended church as a child, noting the grandmother who chiefly raised him — while a believer in Jesus — “loathed ‘organized religion.’ ” His father’s stance as a serious Pentecostal influenced his teen years, but as Vance wrote in The Lamp, “By the time I left the Marines in 2007 and began college at The Ohio State University, I read Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, and called myself an atheist.”

He later found himself connecting to Catholic doctrine — but still hesitated, admitting that “for many years I occupied the uncomfortable territory between curiosity about Catholicism and mistrust.” A Yale Law School graduate, Vance briefly practiced corporate law before entering the tech industry as a venture capitalist.

Vance garnered widespread attention with the publication of his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” later adapted as a film. In 2022, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, representing his home state. Vance credits the support of priests from the Dominican order — and his wife — with his gradual but eventual conversion to Catholicism. He was baptized at the Dominican priory of St. Gertrude Church in Cincinnati by Dominican Father Henry Stephan, a doctoral student and a chaplain at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

“One of the things I try to remind myself as a convert is that there is a lot that I don’t know. As a kid, we used to call new converts to the faith baby Christians and I recognize very much that I am a baby Catholic,” Vance said during the breakfast. “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 in public, because, of course, I’m not always going to get it right, and I don’t want my inadequacies in describing our faith to fall back on the faith itself. And so if you ever hear me pontificating about the Catholic faith, please recognize it comes from a place of deep belief, but it also comes from a place of not always knowing everything all the time.”

He then added, “I try to not get involved in the civil wars between Dominicans and Jesuits, conservative Catholics and progressive Catholics,” which elicited a huge laugh from the audience.

Vance said what attracted him to the Catholic faith is the idea of grace and it is something that does not happen “instantaneously. It is something that God works (in you) over a long period of time.”

Vance added when it comes to controversies — particularly on social media — take a deep breath and take a step back.

“We are not called as Christians to obsess about everything, every media controversy,” Vance added. “Take a page from our grandparents who respected our clergy and looked for guidance but didn’t obsess and fight over every single word that came out of their mouth and went on social media.

“I talk to a lot of Catholics, conservative and progressive. I think sometimes many conservative Catholics are too preoccupied with their politics; criticisms of a particular clergy member or the leader of the Catholic Church. I am not telling you (that you) are wrong, sometimes I even agree with you. I think that what I would say is that it is not in the best interest of any one of us to treat the religious leaders of our faith as just another social media influencer.”