Washington, D.C. Newsroom, May 21, 2025 / 17:02 pm (CNA).
In a sit-down interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, Vice President JD Vance opened up about how his Catholic faith informs his political views and how he squares his religious beliefs with his hard-line views on immigration enforcement.
Vance, an outspoken convert to the faith, appeared on Douthat’s “Interesting Times” podcast while the two were in Rome for Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural Mass this past weekend. Douthat, who is also a convert to Catholicism, is a conservative columnist at the Times.
During the interview, Vance discussed how his faith and Catholic social teaching contribute to his views on governance. Yet, he also explained why he believes an American vice president cannot simply “do everything the Holy Father tells me to do” because of his obligations to serve the interests of the American people.
A Catholic American approach to governing
“When you really believe something, it ought to influence how you think about the way that you do your job, the way that you spend time with your wife and your children,” Vance said. “It just kind of necessarily informs how I live my life.”
Regarding governing, this philosophy means he thinks “the purpose of American politics” is “to encourage our citizens to live a good life.”
Vance said his faith informs his care for “the rights of the unborn” along with his belief in “dignified work,” where a person has “a high enough wage that [he or she] can support a family.”
On family policy, Vance said he fears that American and other Western societies have “become way too hostile to family formation,” contending that they “have been quite bad at supporting families over the last generation, and I think you see that in the fact that fewer people are choosing to start families.”
Vance added that he has faced criticism from the political right for being “insufficiently committed to the capital-M market.” Although he said “I am a capitalist,” he said he is not in principal against all interventions in the marketplace and cited the administration’s tariff policies as an example.
“I think one of the things that I take from my Christian principles and Catholic social teachings — specifically whether you agree with the specific policies of our administration — is the market is a tool, but it is not the purpose of American politics,” the vice president said.
Vance also discussed the potential benefits and drawbacks of developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and said he looks forward to Pope Leo providing moral guidance on these questions.
“The American government is not equipped to provide moral leadership, at least full-scale moral leadership, in the wake of all the changes that are going to come along with AI,” he said. “I think the Church is. This is the sort of thing the Church is very good at.”
Vance said he disagrees with the view that policy and religion are “two totally separate matters … because it understates the way in which all of us are informed by our moral and religious values.” Yet, he also said that taking direct orders from the Vatican on policy matters “would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution.”
“My obligation more broadly as a vice president [is] to serve the American people,” Vance said.
During his time in Rome, he said, “I’m not there as JD Vance, a Catholic parishioner” but rather “I’m there as the vice president of the United States and the leader of the president’s delegation to the pope’s inaugural Mass.”
“So some of the protocols about how I respond to the Holy Father were much different than how I might respond to the Holy Father, or how you might respond to the Holy Father purely in your capacity as a citizen,” Vance told Douthat.
For example, the vice president said he did not bow down to kiss Leo’s ring. Although that is a common act of respect for the pontiff, he noted that kissing the ring of a foreign leader would be against the protocol for an American vice president.
“So, no sign of disrespect, but it’s important to observe the protocols of the country that I love and that I’m representing and that I serve as vice president of, the United States,” he added.
When explaining this balance, Vance said he does not “just disregard” positions of Church hierarchy but that “you make a prudential judgment informed very much by the Church’s teachings as reflected by these leaders.”
The dignity of migrants and immigration enforcement
One of the primary issues on which President Donald Trump’s administration has sparred with the Vatican and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is the enforcement of American immigration laws.
During the first four months of Trump’s presidency, he has clamped down on illegal border crossings, halted the entry of most refugees, stripped federal funding from nongovernmental organizations (including Catholic ones) that resettle migrants, and vowed mass deportations of those who are in the country illegally.
These policies have been criticized by Catholic charitable organizations, the USCCB, Pope Francis, and then-Cardinal Robert Prevost, who is now Pope Leo XIV.
On U.S. immigration policy, Vance noted that the Catechism of the Catholic Church and Catholic leaders acknowledge “the right of a country to enforce its borders” but also emphasize the need to respect “the dignity of migrants.” He said: “You have to be able to hold two ideas in your head at the same time.”
“There are obligations that we have to people who in some ways are fleeing violence, or at least fleeing poverty,” the vice president said. “I also have a very sacred obligation, I think, to enforce the laws and to promote the common good of my own country, defined as the people with the legal right to be here.”
Vance said he spoke with “a lot of cardinals this weekend” about immigration policy and “had a lot of good, respectful conversations, including with cardinals who very strongly disagree with my views on migration.”
“The point that I’ve tried to make is I think a lot about this question of social cohesion in the United States,” he said. “I think about how we form the kind of society again where people can raise families, where people join institutions together.”
The vice president argued that proponents of mass migration do not recognize “how destructive immigration at the levels and at the pace that we’ve seen over the last few years is to the common good” and that “I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly.”
“That’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance,” he said. “That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don’t think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly.”
Vance became Catholic in August 2019, when he was 35 years old, and is the second Catholic vice president of the United States. Former president Joe Biden was the first when he served under former president Barack Obama from 2008–2016.
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About Catholic Social Teaching and the market system, Pope St. John Paul II also stressed “the fact that even the decision to invest in one place rather than another, in one productive sector rather than another is always ‘a moral and cultural choice'” (Centesimus Annus, 1991, n. 36).
And then this overview when asked about “capitalism” as a replacement for fallen Soviet Communism:
“The answer is obviously complex. If by ‘capitalism’ is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a ‘business economy,’ ‘market economy’ or simply ‘free economy.’ But if by ‘capitalism’ is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a ‘strong juridical framework’ which places it at the service of ‘human freedom in its totality,’ and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the ‘core of which is ethical and religious,’ then the reply is certainly negative” (n. 44).
What, then, about affirming the transcendent dignity of each human life versus the marketing or even subsidizing of mifepristone and IVF?