How JD Vance, A ‘Baby Catholic,’ Stumbled Into A Clash With The Pope

Washington Post, How JD Vance, a ‘Baby Catholic,’ Stumbled into a Clash With the Pope:

The first Catholic convert elected to the vice presidency has provoked an extraordinary string of conflicts within the church he joined six years ago.

Only three Catholics have won the presidency or vice presidency. For the first two, Democrats John F. Kennedy and Joe Biden, faith was a muted note in their public lives — a source of pride to millions of American Catholics but rarely invoked as a direct influence on policy.

The third, Vice President JD Vance, a Republican, has launched his current career as the nation’s most prominent elected Catholic in a very different way. In less than three months, Vance has made a string of unusual forays into the fraught borderland between religion and politics, castigating the hierarchy of his own church and defending President Donald Trump’s “America First” nationalism through appeals to ancient Christian texts.

Vance’s pronouncements have divided his co-religionists and inflamed long-smoldering divisions within the church. In February, Pope Francis issued a remarkable letter to U.S. bishops that included a rebuke of Vance’s public theologizing. But the vice president has equally staunch defenders among conservative American Catholics who have repeatedly criticized the current papacy.

The entire episode demonstrates how Catholicism’s place in American political culture has changed dramatically over the last half-century. When Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he sought to defuse suspicions that he held secret allegiances to Rome, declaring his commitment to “an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”

Since then, anti-Catholic bias has largely receded from U.S. politics, and the faith has grown popular with a new generation on the right — including Vance — who see it as a bulwark against corrosive social and cultural change. The nation’s first Catholic president may have downplayed his religion, but its current vice president does not hesitate to cite papal encyclicals at tech conferences, or to back up his social media arguments with quotations from long-dead saints.

“It’s a huge win to have a major public figure use this kind of language,” said R.R. Reno, a former theology professor and editor of the conservative religious journal First Things. “You then can pivot and debate about whether he uses it properly, and what the real meaning is. But to even have that debate in public is quite a remarkable turn of events.”

Yet the early collision between Vatican authorities and the White House has also stirred profound unease among some Catholics who say their faith is being co-opted in the service of nationalist policies contradicted by the church’s social teaching.

“If you’re a Catholic, you don’t just choose your own adventure, so to speak. You don’t just take your own interpretation of the Bible and put that over and against what the church teaches,” said Dawn Eden Goldstein, a Catholic writer who holds advanced degrees in canon law and theology and who has criticized Vance. “That is very dangerous. But that is a practice of people who want to alter the faith to suit their political agenda, rather than looking to the faith to shape their approach to politics.”

Wall Street Journal, As Catholic Church Enters New Era, Conservative U.S. Members Push It Right:

The conservative wing is reviving old practices and growing more assertive in the battle for the future of the Church—and the nation.

On Easter Sunday, hours before his death, an ailing Pope Francis roused himself to share a brief meeting at the Vatican with U.S. Vice President JD Vance.

For Francis, it was to be a final encounter with a conservative wing of American Catholicism that is flourishing and increasingly assertive at a time when the Church, more broadly, is struggling.

The Pope’s passing on Monday morning has thrown open a global succession race to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. Yet it has also focused attention on the Vatican’s fraught relationship with an American flock that is undergoing cultural and theological changes that echo the rightward shift in the nation’s politics in the MAGA era.

Personified by Vance, who was baptized in the Catholic Church in 2019, at age 35, adherents to this conservative style are reviving old practices, including the traditional Latin Mass and women wearing veils. While their numbers may still be small among the universe of Americans who identify as Catholic, they are increasingly influential, say observers—in the struggle for the Church’s future and that of the nation.

The conservatives are more likely to be kneeling in pews on Sunday and managing parish affairs while others stay home. Their worldview has found purchase in the Trump administration’s policies—be it the introduction of sweeping tariffs or its mass deportation of immigrants who entered the country illegally. And they are building a network of universities and media outlets to educate future cadres.

“Vance is one of a legion of young people who have followed the same path from atheism to radical suspicion and rejection of liberal culture to a form of Augustine-inspired Christianity,” said David Deane, a theologian who gave a recent lecture on Catholicism and the new right. “The seminaries are increasingly populated by young men who think like this.”

Their ascendance made for an unusually tense relationship with a Pope who emphasized compassion and humility. Before Sunday’s meeting, Vance had engaged in an unusually tetchy back-and-forth with the Vatican over the Trump administration’s deportation policies.

“For [conservatives], Pope Francis was a shock. And it became more of a shock when he started talking about gays, divorce and capitalism,” said Massimo Faggioli, a church historian at Villanova University. “It was a relationship that was damaged from the beginning.”

The appointment of a liberal successor, Faggioli warned, risked further estrangement. One possibility he cited was a “liquid schism” in which the two parties don’t suffer a formal rupture but increasingly look past one another. “The fear is that it basically could become a Catholic Church that is independent from the Vatican,” Faggioli said. …

The Catholic Project offered a stark measure of the conservatives’ rise in a 2022 survey of more than 3,500 U.S. Catholic priests. Among those ordained since 2020, it found, some 80% identified as “conservative/orthodox.” By contrast, those identifying as progressives and liberals were facing a “virtual collapse.” …

“For a lot of progressives, they think that if the Church could just accommodate the modern world, it will stop its decline. But everywhere the Church has accepted the modern world and its contemporary values, it’s died,” said Timothy Gray, president of the Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school of theology that emphasizes a return to the rigors of scripture and tradition and is one of the movement’s leading lights. …

According to the most recent Pew Research Center survey, 19% of Americans—or some 53 million adults—identify as Catholic. That’s down from 24% in 2007. After a decadeslong slide, that decline appears to be leveling off.

A more salient statistic may be church attendance. At least half of Catholics turned up weekly in the 1970s, compared with only about a quarter today, according to Ryan Burge, an Eastern Illinois University professor who tracks religious data.

It’s unclear just how much influence American conservatives will wield in the global contest to select a new pope. During his tenure, Francis stocked the College of Cardinals that will eventually determine his successor with loyalists who share his more liberal outlook.

Still, America is home to the world’s fourth-largest Catholic population, and it’s a big source of wealth for a Vatican under financial strain.

Ryan Burge (Eastern Illinois University; Author, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going (2d ed. 2023)), Are Catholic Converts More Hard Core Than Cradle Catholics?:

[I]n the Vance case the overriding assumption is that Catholic converts tend to be drawn to the conservative ethics surrounding issues like abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, etc.