Vice President JD Vance ardently defended the newly elected Pope Leo XIV, saying that he believed that politics were getting in the way of what should be a bipartisan celebration of the first election of an American pope in the 2000-year history of the Catholic Church.
For context, in an interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show on May 9, 2025, Vice President Vance expressed his support for Robert Prevost, now known as Pope Leo XIV, a Chicago native who is the first American pope in history. Vance described the election as “a big moment” and argued that the media’s focus on the pope’s political leanings was irrelevant to his role as leader of the Catholic Church.
In the interview, Vice President Vance said that Prevost’s election as Pope Leo XIV was “a big moment, of course, for American Catholics,” adding, “So many people my entire lifetime has [sic] said you’re never going to have an American pope. Obviously, now we do, so I think that’s a great thing. The second thing I’d say is you know, we don’t know a whole lot about him, but I just wish him the best, right?”
Continuing, Vance affirmed his personal Catholic faith, explaining that he was praying for Pope Leo’s “wisdom, for his good decision, and his good health, and hope that he has a long and successful papacy.” He added, “You know, people are asking, ‘Is he a conservative or is he a liberal? Will he attack President Trump and J.D. Vance on certain things, and hasn’t attacked Democrats on other things?’ And I guess my response to this is it’s very hard to fit a 2,000-year-old institution into the politics of 2025 America.”
Moving on, Vance continued to make the case that the Catholic church does not fit in the box of partisan politics, saying, “I am a Catholic convert, and so I come at this maybe with a slightly different perspective. But I try not to play the politicization of the Pope game. I’m sure he’s going to say a lot of things that I love. I’m sure he’ll say some things that I disagree with, but I’ll continue to pray for him and the Church despite it all and through it all, and that’ll be the way that I handle it.”
In response, host Hugh Hewitt asked Vance to weigh in on how “the American media never fails to fail to understand the Catholic Church,” adding, “Three out of the first four questions [in the recent press conference with Pope Leo] were about President Trump.” Vance responded, “I think it’s really disappointing, because you know, the Church is so much bigger than politics. Obviously, there are 1.3 billion Catholics. There are about, you know, I don’t know, probably 100 million or so American Catholics, maybe a little bit smaller than that.”
Building on his point, Vance argued that most Americans “are not thinking about whether the pope is a Republican or a Democrat, or a conservative or a liberal,” adding, “There are a lot of views the Catholic leadership holds that are, you know, you might consider on the right side of the spectrum. There are a lot of views they’re going to hold that might be more traditionally on the left side of the spectrum.”
Concluding the conversation, Vance told Hewitt that he believed that the discourse surrounding the pope would be better “for all of us” if it refocused on “the saving of souls,” adding that Catholic doctrine and the role of the pope do not fit “into a pre-ordained political box.”
Featured image credit: JD Vance via X