JD Vance Unloads on Vatican Officials in New Book
Catholic convert JD Vance is airing fresh grievances against the Vatican and reflecting on meeting Pope Francis the day before the pontiff’s 2025 death in his new book.
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The vice president met with top Vatican diplomats, including Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, while making a stop in Italy on his way to India in April of last year.
Vance, 41, complains in his new memoir that the meeting was “unsettling,” taking aim at Vatican officials for being overly diplomatic and unwilling to have a frank discussion on the issues dividing the Trump administration and the Holy See, according to The Washington Post, which obtained a copy of the book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.
According to Vance, Parolin raised the issue of migration and acknowledged the United States’ right to control its own borders but encouraged the Trump administration to treat migrants humanely.
“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 writes, according to the Post.
The vice president adds that the Vatican officials “never specified” which aspects of the administration’s immigration policies they objected to.
He grants that the diplomats may have avoided specifics “out of a desire to be, well, diplomatic,” but writes that their comments were ultimately “too abstract to be helpful.”
The self-described “baby Catholic” adds 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.”
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Vance writes that he preferred the direct rebukes offered by Francis, who frequently blasted President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign.
By the time the meeting concluded, however, it remained uncertain whether Francis—who was gravely ill—would be able to meet Vance at all, the vice president writes. But on Easter morning, he “received a text message telling me that the Pope would like to see me.”
Vance writes that Francis was “more fragile than I realized,” and that he “felt even worse that he had forced himself out of bed early to meet with me.”
Francis, 88, died less than 24 hours after meeting with Vance.
Vance’s book, which traces his path from evangelical Christianity in his childhood to atheism in his youth and his conversion to Catholicism in 2019, comes amid strained relations between the Vatican and the Trump administration.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Vatican for comment.
Despite being a relatively new Catholic, the vice president has taken it upon himself to school Francis’s successor, Pope Leo XIV, on Catholic theology after the pontiff publicly criticized the Trump administration on multiple occasions.
“I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology‚” the vice president said at a Turning Point USA event in April.
Trump, meanwhile, has taken an even more hostile approach, falsely claiming Leo said Iran can have a nuclear weapon, bizarrely calling him “weak on crime,” and telling him to “get his act together.”
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