(Adnkronos) – “Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis? Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated the Holocaust camps and freed the innocent people who survived the Holocaust? I certainly think the answer is yes.” Thus JD Vance, the vice president who converted to Catholicism in adulthood, escalates the attacks of Donald Trump’s United States on Leo XIV, thinking to demonstrate that the Pope was wrong, invoking theology itself, when in recent weeks he said that “the disciple of Christ is never on the side of those who yesterday wielded the sword and today launch bombs.”
“We can, of course, have all sorts of disagreements about whether this or that conflict is just, but I think that just as it’s important for the Vice President of the United States to be careful when speaking about political matters, I believe it’s very, very important for the Pope to be careful when speaking about theological matters,” Vance argued at the University of Georgia, during a Turning Point USA event, the ultra-conservative organization founded by Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last September.
Vance – who is about to publish a book recounting his conversion to Catholicism, reaffirming how Trump’s vice president aims for the support of the Republican religious base for a future White House run – therefore did not hesitate to correct the Pontiff, stating that when “discussing theological matters, one must be careful, one must remain anchored to the truth.” “This is something I try to do,” he added, “and it is certainly something I expect from a religious person, whether Catholic or Protestant.”
The vice president, however, did not fail to reiterate that he has “great respect for the Pope, I like him, I admire him, and I was also able to get to know him a little,” referring to the meeting he had last May, after the first Mass as Pontiff of Pope Francis’s successor, who died on April 21, the day after receiving Vance in audience. “It doesn’t bother me that he talks about current affairs, even, to be honest, when I don’t agree with how he applies a particular principle,” concluded the vice president, who was then interrupted shortly after by someone in the audience who shouted, “Jesus Christ does not support genocide.”
It is not the first time that Vance finds himself in a sort of debate on theological issues with Pope Prevost, and even in the previous one, the thought of Saint Augustine, the Church Father in whose land, ancient Hippo, Leo XIV, the first Augustinian Pope in history, went on pilgrimage yesterday during his visit to Algeria, was central.
If now the vice president seems to challenge the Pope – who trained in American Augustinian seminaries and universities, then graduating from the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago and then from the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome – his interpretation of ‘bellum iustum’, the just war, which Saint Augustine intended as a temporary necessity to restore peace and justice against an injustice, before becoming Pope, Cardinal Prevost reprimanded the vice president for his America First interpretation of another Augustinian principle, that of ‘ordo amoris’, the order of love.
Vance, who chose Saint Augustine as his patron saint at the time of his conversion in 2019, had indeed stated that the principle dictates that “we love our family first, then our neighbors, then our community, then our country, and then we consider the rest of the world,” thus legitimizing the policy of cuts to cooperation, refugees, and the fight against immigration implemented by the Trump administration. This utilitarian and hierarchical vision of love aroused indignation in many Christian groups in the USA, with Cardinal Prevost writing on X: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus does not ask us to rank our love for others.”
