JD Vance to Pope Leo XIV: I Hope You’ve Learned From Trump on Immigration
The vice president told Laura Ingraham the Holy See’s views on immigration are “troubling” — two days after ICE detained a nun walking to Mass in Texas. His office still hasn’t answered my questions.
JD Vance appeared on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle Tuesday night and told Laura Ingraham that the Vatican’s views on immigration are “troubling.”
“I do think that some of the things that have come out of the Vatican on the immigration question in particular have been troubling, and ultimately I disagree with it,” the vice president said.
He also had advice for the Church’s leadership. “What I would hope that the Catholic leadership has learned from some of the things that me and Marco and the president have said about immigration is, it’s not just about the dignity of the immigrant,” Vance said, referring to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “It’s also about the dignity of the native-born factory worker who has their wages destroyed.”
A Catholic vice president hopes the pope has learned something about migrants from Donald Trump. Read that sentence again.
The appearance was a stop on the promotional tour for Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, the spiritual memoir Vance published on June 16.
The same tour brought him to Michael Knowles’ podcast, released earlier that day, where he called yard signs reading “no person is illegal” a “disgusting butchering of the Nicene Creed.”
An earlier stop on the tour featured him calling Democrats “terrible people.”
The vice president has now spent a year and a half telling the Catholic Church what it should believe about the stranger. The record deserves to be laid out in full.
In January 2025, days into the second Trump administration, Vance went on Fox News and invoked ordo amoris — the classical theological ordering of love — to defend the White House’s mass-deportation campaign. You love your family first, he explained, then your neighbor, then your community, then your fellow citizens, and only after all of that the rest of the world.
Rome answered him twice.
On February 3, 2025, a Chicago-born cardinal named Robert Prevost shared a headline on X that read, “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
Days later, Pope Francis wrote a letter to the American bishops that rejected Vance’s theology outright. Christian love, Francis wrote, is “not a concentric expansion of interests,” and the true ordo amoris is the one Jesus teaches in the parable of the Good Samaritan. And as I first reported — a detail CNN’s Christopher Lamb later confirmed — the cardinal who helped Francis write that letter was Robert Prevost.
Vance told the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast that February he was “surprised” by the pushback. Two months later he met Pope Francis for a brief Easter Sunday exchange at the Casa Santa Marta; Francis died the next morning, making Vance the last foreign leader to see him alive.
On May 8, 2025, the cardinal who had corrected Vance’s theology on X walked onto the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica as Pope Leo XIV.
Eleven days later, Vance flew to Rome for the inaugural Mass and met Leo on May 19, hand-delivering a letter from Trump inviting the pope to the White House. Leo set it on his desk and said, “at some point.”
In September, Leo called the administration’s treatment of immigrants “inhuman.” Two months later, after encouraging the American bishops to issue a special message on immigration, he said migrants in this country are being treated “in a way that is extremely disrespectful, to say the least,” and said “there is a deep reflection that needs to be made” about the country’s detained migrants.
In April, after Leo warned that a “delusion of omnipotence” lay behind the American war on Iran, Trump answered with weeks of public attacks — a pressure campaign that went nowhere with the American public.
During this time, Vance twice told the pope to stay in his lane: the Vatican, he said, should “stick to matters of morality” and let the president of the United States “stick to dictating American public policy.” That same week he told a Georgia audience the pope should “be careful” when talking about theology, and the U.S. bishops’ doctrine committee rebuked him for it.
When American bombs fell on Iran again in June, Leo declared that no war is blessed by God.
Which brings us to the phone call. In mid-June, during the same book tour, Vance sat for an interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, who asked him directly whether he had spoken to the pope in the past few months. Vance pivoted to a tribute about his “respect for the Holy Father” until Douthat pressed him. “Have I spoken to the pope in the last few months? Yes,” Vance answered, describing what he called a “positive relationship” with Leo.
No one at the Vatican has been able to confirm that conversation to me. Two sources with intimate knowledge of the Holy See’s diplomatic relationships told me they were skeptical it happened.
And on Tuesday in Rome, I put the question to Cardinal Michael Czerny at a public event. Czerny is the Jesuit who has led the Vatican’s office for migrants and refugees since 2022 — the post that Pope Leo just filled with his successor. He told me he was not aware of any conversation between the two men.
This is not a strong record for a man who spent Tuesday night on national television lecturing the pope.
Two days before that appearance, ICE agents detained a nun walking to Sunday Mass in McAllen, Texas. Sister Leticia Ugboaja — 56 years old, a registered nurse, a member of the Daughters of Mary Mother of Mercy, dressed in her habit — was taken into custody on her way to Our Lady of Sorrows Church and released only after members of Congress intervened. I wrote about her detention this morning.
I asked the vice president’s office to respond to Sister Letty’s detention. As of tonight, it has not.
The teaching Vance finds “troubling” was not invented in a Vatican press office. Christ tells his disciples in Matthew 25 that the nations will be judged on their treatment of the stranger: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
In 1952, Pius XII opened Exsul Familia by holding up the Holy Family — fleeing Herod into Egypt — as the archetype of every refugee family. Two popes have now applied that tradition directly to Vance’s own words, and both reached the same verdict.
Vance entered the Church in 2019, received privately under the direction of conservative Dominican priests and inspired in part by the strange religion of Peter Thiel.
Seven years later, he wants the magisterium to learn from Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and himself. The lesson plan runs heavy on wage economics and skips the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew entirely.
On the Fourth of July, while the government Vance serves celebrates itself, Pope Leo will stand on Lampedusa — the Mediterranean island where Francis took the first trip of his papacy, and where thousands of migrants have drowned within sight of Europe.
“Enough with the bullying,” he said as he prepared for the journey. The bullies required no naming.
On one point, I agree with the vice president: the pope has been paying close attention. After eighteen months of this record, Leo has surely learned exactly who JD Vance is.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with a pope whom the vice president of the United States mocked on national television this week — and who will answer from Lampedusa on the Fourth of July, praying among the migrants that Vance’s government hunts.
In an era poisoned by cruelty and cynicism, we remain rooted in a faith that has never stopped repeating the words of Christ: whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda.
They are looking for courage, for truth, for love made visible in action — and in a summer when the vice president mocks the successor of Peter on cable television while nuns are detained on their way to Mass, that hunger has never been more urgent.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of every migrant against the machinery of mass deportation — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Vance’s theology is actually worse than his grammar, which is itself deplorable.
I am an unregenerate grammarian and find "Catholic leadership has learned from some of the things that me and Marco and the president have said" totally unacceptable. I do that to keep from the horror of what "me and he and he" said from ruining the rest of my day.