Vice President JD Vance said he’s praying for Pope Leo XIV and will continue to do so no matter how the pontiff's positions and statements are interpreted politically.
“I just wish him the best, right? I’m a Catholic. He’s now the head of the Catholic Church, and we’ll pray for his wisdom, for his good decisions, and his good health, and hope that he has a long and successful papacy,” Vance told radio host Hugh Hewitt last week.
“You know, these things always get discolored a little bit by American politics or by politics writ large,” he continued. “You know, people are asking is he a conservative or is he a liberal. Will he attack President Trump and J.D. Vance on certain things, and hasn’t attacked Democrats on other things. And I guess my response to this is it’s very hard to fit a 2,000-year-old institution into the politics of 2025 America. I try not to do that. I am a Catholic convert, and so I come at this maybe with a slightly different perspective. But I try not to play the politicization of the pope game. 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, and that’ll be the way that I handle it.”
Vance emphasized that the Catholic Church is "so much bigger than politics" and those on both sides of the aisle would do well to remember that.
"Obviously, there are 1.3 billion Catholics," he said. "There are about, you know, I don’t know, probably 100 million or so American Catholics, maybe a little bit smaller than that. But it’s a big institution with a lot of members. And most of the people are not thinking about whether the pope is a Republican or a Democrat, or a conservative or a liberal. And the truth is, Hugh, as you know well, that there are a lot of views the Catholic leadership holds that are, you know, you might consider on the right side of the spectrum. There are a lot of views they’re going to hold that might be more traditionally on the left side of the spectrum. And then there are a lot of views that don’t map easily onto politics at all. And my attitude is, you know, the Church is about saving souls, and about spreading the Gospel. And yeah, 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. And I think it’s much healthier for the American media, and certainly for Catholics, to not take such a, you know, politics in the age of social media attitude towards the papacy. I just think it’s bigger than that, and it’s not even, it’s sort of tangential to that in so many ways. And I think it’s a lot healthier way to go through life is to do that as opposed to focus obsessively on the politics. And by the way, Hugh, that’s true for liberals and conservatives."
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