JD Vance, Rebuked by Two Popes, Publishes a Book About Finding God
The vice president's “Communion” promises a religious memoir. His actual Catholic record tells a different story.
Dear friends —
JD Vance announced a new book today about his conversion to Catholicism, timed for what is clearly a presidential campaign.
Letters from Leo has spent the past year building the record he hopes you won’t read — the papal rebukes, the Peter Thiel connection, the lies about Church teaching, the ICE killings, the fights with the pro-life movement.
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In a country where the vice president writes books about communion while his administration shoots unarmed Americans in the street, the need for a Catholic voice willing to tell the truth has never been more urgent.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than political religion dressed up in sacramental language.
They are looking for courage, for accountability, for a faith that actually means what it says about human dignity — and right now, as JD Vance prepares to run for the presidency wrapped in a faith he has spent years contradicting, that hunger matters more than ever.
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Vice President JD Vance announced today that HarperCollins will publish his second book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, on June 16.
The 304-page volume promises to chronicle Vance’s conversion to Roman Catholicism and the spiritual journey that carried him from Appalachian poverty through Yale Law School into the second-highest office in the country.
The reaction online was immediate and skeptical.
Commenters accused Vance of cashing in on religion while serving as vice president of the United States. Others pointed out the absurdity of a sitting VP finding time to write a spiritual memoir. One user asked how Vance could write about faith while his administration vaporized schoolgirls and lied about it. “Go to confession,” another replied.
Richard Hanania put it plainly: “An interesting choice on the cusp of a presidential run that will probably find him in constant battle with the Pope.”
That’s exactly right. Communion will be a campaign book dressed in a religious tapestry.
JD Vance is running for president — that much is obvious to anyone watching — and this book is timed to do what campaign books always do: define the candidate on his own terms, before opponents and journalists define him on theirs.
The problem for Vance is that Letters from Leo has spent the past year documenting the record he hopes voters won’t read.
We have covered his conversion, his Catholic intellectual braintrust, his pope-skeptic billionaire backer, his fights with the pro-life movement, his clashes with two popes, and his administration’s violence against the very communities the Church has served for over a century.
Vance wants to launder his politics through a Catholic identity. The pages of Communion will almost certainly present a tidy narrative: a lost Appalachian kid finds God, discovers purpose, and enters public life with a moral compass.
What that narrative will not include is the full story of how his faith has collided, repeatedly and publicly, with the actual teachings of the Church he joined.
We refuse to let that go unchallenged. Below the paywall, paid subscribers will find the wholesale account — the investigations, exposés, and documented lies — that Letters from Leo has assembled over the past year. Consider it the companion reading that Communion desperately needs.
The Conversion
JD Vance was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church on a summer day in 2019, inside the private chapel of a Dominican priory in Cincinnati. He chose St. Augustine as his patron saint. The ceremony was intimate, far from cameras, and facilitated by two Dominican friars whose résumés uncannily mirrored Vance’s own elite trajectory.
As I reported last fall, Fr. Henry Stephan, OP — born Brian Stephan in California, an Ivy League politics major turned priest — met regularly with Vance at St. Gertrude Church in Cincinnati beginning in 2018. For months they discussed Aquinas, Augustine, virtue, and politics over coffee and lunch. Vance received bespoke, private instruction rather than the standard OCIA classes most converts attend.
The second friar, Fr. Dominic Legge, a fellow Yale Law graduate and director of the Thomistic Institute in D.C., laid the intellectual groundwork from the capital. Two scholar-priests who had straddled law and theology guided a man who would soon straddle faith and raw political power.
