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Sister Nancy Sylvester entered the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1966. On Saturday night, sixty years into that vocation, she rose from her chair in Flat Rock, Michigan, and asked JD Vance a question about the Gospel that he never answered.
Sylvester, a former president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, was one of the voters CBS News invited to question the vice president at a town hall moderated by CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil. She told Vance that her sisters minister at the southern border and around Detroit, where children come home from school to find their parents gone.
Then she put the question to him as one Catholic to another.
“We may not always agree, ’cause I understand you don’t always even agree with our pope sometimes. And so I want to, though, wonder: what would you say? How would you justify to people of faith, especially those of us who try to follow the Gospel, how the behavior of the ICE men and women can constantly be justified in terms of the kind of values we want to live by?”
Vance opened with the pope. He mentioned Leo’s lung cancer diagnosis, asked Christians to pray for him, and called him “a good man.” The prayer came days after I reported that neither Vance nor President Trump had said a public word about the pope’s surgery in the first 83 hours after it was announced.
From there he went to numbers. He cited “approximately 25 million illegal aliens” who arrived over thirty years and said the administration is “trying to strike a balance.” Dokoupil asked whether it was striking it, and Vance called the effort “a work in progress,” conceding that some agents “really screw up.”
When Dokoupil asked for the biggest mistake of the ICE rollout, Vance said the administration doesn’t “always advertise that stuff,” then turned to cartels and fentanyl. Sylvester tried once more, asking how, from the core of his faith, he wants to treat immigrants. Dokoupil folded her follow-up into the next voter’s question, and Vance’s answer turned to H-1B visas.
A rough night in Michigan
That next voter, a naturalized citizen named Niv, told Vance he was the first person she voted for after becoming an American. She asked why he is “scapegoating immigrants,” citing his description of H-1B workers as “foreign indentured servants.” Vance replied, “To the extent that my rhetoric has been imperfect here, that’s on me.”
The rest of the hour went no easier, and Dokoupil interrupted him again and again. When a Detroit barber who twice voted for Trump asked why gas now costs more than $4 a gallon, Vance blamed the refining capacity that went offline under Joe Biden.
Dokoupil cut in: “It’s almost been two years. At a certain point it becomes your economy, not Joe Biden’s economy.” Asked later whether anything in the White House made him squeamish about corruption, Vance insisted that “the president would never tolerate that behavior, Tony.”
The most wrenching exchange belonged to Joey Amor. His wife, Army Reserve soldier Nicole Amor, was one of six Americans killed by an Iranian drone in Kuwait on March 1, and Vance stood at Dover Air Force Base when their remains came home.
Amor told him there had been “a lot of mistakes and a lot of fundamental failures” before the strike and asked how the administration would hold its leaders accountable. Vance answered that this was “literally the first time I’ve heard of this.”
The Associated Press read the night as a preview of the rocky path Vance may face if he runs for president in 2028. For a Catholic convert, though, the question that should have weighed heaviest came from a woman who has kept her vows for six decades.
The sisters keep asking
Sylvester is not the first sister to put the Gospel to Vance. Last November, I wrote about Sister JoAnn Persch, a 91-year-old Sister of Mercy who had prayed outside the Broadview ICE facility near Chicago every Friday since a 20-below-zero morning in January 2007.
On All Saints Day 2025, Persch walked the Eucharist to the ICE checkpoint alongside Chicago Auxiliary Bishop José María García-Maldonado and six others, asking to bring Communion to the detainees inside. ICE refused, citing safety.
“Now, I want to know whose safety?” Persch told the Daily Beast. Asked what she made of the Catholic vice president, she offered three words: “Pray, I guess.”
She died on Nov. 14, two weeks after that Mass. Five days later, a coalition of Chicago clergy and sisters sued the federal government to restore pastoral access to the men and women held inside Broadview.
Other sisters have paid for their witness since. In December, the Department of Homeland Security suspended Sister Norma Pimentel’s Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley from federal funding and moved to bar it for six years.
In June, ICE agents detained Sister Leticia Ugboaja on her way to Sunday Mass in McAllen, Texas, and let her go hours later after members of Congress from both parties intervened. Two days after her arrest, Vance told Fox News he hoped Catholic leaders had learned that immigration is “not just about the dignity of the immigrant.”
Pope Leo XIV has already answered the question Vance would not. Days after the Broadview Mass, the pope told reporters that “Jesus says very clearly at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, ‘How did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not?’”
That is Matthew 25, the passage by which Christ says every one of us (vice presidents included) will be judged. Vance was baptized in 2019 and published a memoir about his conversion this summer. The women who taught generations of American children their catechism keep asking him to live by it.
Sister Nancy’s question is still on the table. JoAnn Persch answered it with her life, which came down to two habits she kept until the end: pray, and keep showing up at the gate.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Sister Nancy Sylvester, with the memory of Sister JoAnn Persch, and with every woman religious who keeps showing up at the detention center gate and the town hall microphone to ask our leaders how their policies square with the Gospel.
Their witness is the oldest kind of Catholic courage. It asks nothing of power except that it remember the stranger, and it keeps asking long after the cameras leave.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that speaks plainly to power. They want leaders, lay and ordained, who read Matthew 25 as the test it is.
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We are all waiting for an answer to Sister Sylvester's question: it's not just a question for Vance - it's a question for all people who support his administration's cruelty and total disregard for the teachings of Jesus regarding "the stranger". There is absolutely no justification that can reconcile the actions of ICE and the teachings of Christ.
He speaks with forked tongue. Sad.