Two Popes Rebuked Him. JD Vance Still Keeps Mocking the Church.
As Donald Trump publicly wonders if he’ll make it to heaven, his nominally Catholic vice president faces deeper questions about whether his own actions are already closing the gates.
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On Wednesday, a United States immigration enforcement officer shot Renee Nicole Macklin Good three times in the head and chest.
Good — a 37-year-old widowed mother of three — lost her life within moments.
For Vice President JD Vance, however, this tragedy quickly became a talking point to demonize Good and defend the deadly force.
As Good’s wife later noted of that day, “We had whistles. They had guns” — yet within hours Vance was on Twitter insisting the shooting was “a tragedy of [Good’s] own making”.
He echoed and escalated his administration’s swift effort to discredit the victim.
Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem had immediately labeled Good’s actions “an act of domestic terrorism,” and President Trump claimed — contrary to video evidence — that she “viciously ran over” an ICE officer.
Vance not only justified the killing; he outright blamed Good herself. “Don’t illegally interfere in federal law enforcement. It’s really that simple,” he tweeted on Jan. 7, as if a point-blank killing were an appropriate consequence.
The next morning, he went further. Vance publicly challenged Democrats to say whether the ICE agent was wrong “defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over” — Vance’s own slur for a woman known by loved ones as a kind, faith-filled neighbor.
There was no hint of sorrow or prayers for Good’s grieving family; instead Vance pledged full support to ICE and warned that the administration would “work even harder to enforce the law”.
I responded immediately to our nominally Catholic vice president.
But Vance wasn’t done. In a press conference yesterday, he said “There’s a part of me that feels very, very sad for this woman. Not just because she lost her life but because I think that she is a victim of left-wing ideology.”
“What young mother shows up and decides they are going to throw their car in front of ICE officers that are enforcing legitimate law? You have to be brainwashed to get to that point to where you’re willing—not just to protest, that’s fine—but throw your vehicle in front of law enforcement officers.”
“To get to that point you have to be radicalized in a very, very sad way.”
Such a response is staggering from a self-professed Catholic leader.
In moments like this, even secular politicians typically offer condolences and urge calm. Vance chose outrage.
As a Catholic convert, he should know that the sanctity of life and the dignity of every person are foundational. Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV have both taken Vance to task in his first year as vice president.
When Vance tried to defend hardline immigration raids by citing ordo amoris (an “order of love” from St. Augustine), Francis publicly corrected him. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests. The true ordo amoris is love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” the pope wrote in rebuke of Vance’s America-first spin.
And Pope Leo XIV, the first American pontiff, has been equally blunt about the cruelty of the Trump-Vance agenda.
Here’s a rundown.
