The pope has sharply criticized the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies.
ROME (Politico) — Vice President JD Vance is spending Easter weekend in Rome, where he’ll meet with a top Vatican official amid tension with the Catholic Church over the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies.
Vance — the highest-ranking Catholic in the U.S. government — traveled to Rome on Friday, where he met with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni one day after her chummy White House confab with President Donald Trump. He also attended Good Friday service at St. Peter’s Basilica, and he’s set to tour cultural and religious sites with his family and meet with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state.
Vance’s visit to the seat of Catholicism during the Church’s holiest days of the year comes under the shadow of his public tiff with an ailing Pope Francis and in the wake of his virulently anti-Europe comments. And as the White House increasingly leans into its Christian bonafides through its policies and messaging, the visit from the No. 2 in an administration that the Church has starkly opposed on key issues lays bare the complicated relationship between the Trump White House and Catholic Church leadership.
It also sheds light on a broader rift between conservative American Catholics, a majority of whom voted for Trump in 2024, and Francis, who condemned Trump’s mass deportation agenda and is viewed by some conservative Catholics as liberal.
“Vance, writ small, contains the tension between increasingly vocal conservative Catholics and what this pope represents,” said Tom Roberts, former executive editor of the National Catholic Reporter.
The Trump administration has sparred with the Church repeatedly in the past few months over Trump’s strict immigration policies and nativist rhetoric, which differ sharply from Francis’ more progressive, pro-immigrant stances. The squabble peaked in February when the pope himself sent American bishops an extraordinary letter denouncing the president’s mass deportation agenda and slamming Vance’s understanding of a medieval theological concept.
“Vice President Vance looks forward to meeting with Prime Minister Meloni and Church officials while in Italy and is grateful for the opportunity to visit some of Rome’s amazing cultural and religious sites with his family during Holy Week,” Vance’s spokesperson, Taylor Van Kirk, said in a statement before the vice president’s departure.
A Vatican spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump considers himself a non-denominational Christian, but he has stacked the highest echelons of his administration with Catholics, including Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Border Czar Tom Homan.
“President Trump, for not being Catholic himself, gives tremendous regard to Catholicism and to a lot of prominent Catholics,” said Steve Cortes, a senior political adviser at the conservative CatholicVote who worked with Vance on his 2022 Senate campaign.
Trump has long held electoral support from Protestant and Evangelical Christians, but in last year’s election made inroads among Catholic voters, winning them by 10 points in 2024 compared to 1 point in 2020 when he faced Joe Biden, who often spoke in public about his Catholic faith. Conservative Christians represent a major bloc of the president’s base, and some believe his election and survival of an assassination attempt last summer was divinely ordained. Still, Trump — thrice-married, with a history of lewd remarks and a trail of sexual misconduct allegations he has denied — has leaned on his vice presidents to foster the White House’s relationship with the faithful.
During his first term, that was Mike Pence, a devout Evangelical who has since slammed Trump for not pushing for a nationwide abortion ban in his second term. Now that messenger is Vance, a Catholic convert who was baptized in 2019 and whose politics and policy positions appear to be deeply shaped by his faith.
Vance represented the administration at a National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in February and recounted the ways it has advanced religious liberty.
“I feel very confident in saying that between protecting the rights of pro-life protesters, between ensuring that we have an opportunity to protect the rights of the unborn in the first place, and, importantly, protecting the religious liberty of all people, but in particular Catholics, I think that we can say that President Trump, though not a Catholic himself, has been an incredibly good president for Catholics in the United States of America,” Vance said.
In its first months of Trump’s second term, the administration has leaned into the Christian faith of its leaders. The president established a White House Faith Office, led by the televangelist Paula White-Cain, who sits in prime real estate in the West Wing basement, according to CNN, near top aides like Homan and Steve Witkoff. And Trump has ordered an end to “the anti-Christian weaponization of government” as State Department employees have been instructed to report each other if they witness “anti-Christian bias.”
“As we gather with family and friends, we’ll not forget the true source of our joy and our strength: America has put our trust in God,” Trump said Wednesday during a White House Easter prayer service and dinner. On Thursday, there was another, standing room only prayer service in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
But the zeal from the White House comes as the Vatican has pushed back on one of Trump’s policy priorities: mass deportation.
In a letter to U.S. bishops in February, the pope said mass deportations of undocumented immigrants “damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.”
“What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly,” he added.
Francis appeared to take direct aim at Vance, who earlier that week took to X to justify his hardline immigration stance through the ancient theological concept of ordo amoris, or “order of love.” That concept, Vance argued on Fox News, meant, “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
The pope disagreed.
“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’” he wrote, “that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
The response surprised some American Catholics and administration officials — including Vance.
“I thought that was kind of a shocking letter to the American bishop that the pope would comment on a politician’s tweet. It was rather striking, kind of unprecedented,” said RR Reno, editor of the right-leaning First Things magazine who defended Vance’s understanding of ordo amoris.
Homan, speaking as a “lifelong Catholic,” fired back at the pope. “He ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work,” he told reporters. “Leave border enforcement to us. He wants to attack us for securing our border? He’s got a wall around the Vatican.”
Vance’s response at the February prayer breakfast was more measured. “My goal here is not to litigate with him or any other clergy member about who is right and who is wrong,” he said, adding that he believes his immigration policies serve “the best interest of the American people.”
Vance added that he and his children say a daily prayer for the pope, who is recovering from bronchial infections and double pneumonia.
The Church also slammed the Trump administration’s sharp budget cuts. After a monthslong fight over federal funding, earlier this month, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said it made a “heartbreaking” decision to end its partnership with the federal government to serve refugees and migrant children.
In January, Vance claimed the conference had received “$100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants,” suggesting the bishops were “worried about their bottom line.”
The Trump administration is not the first instance of American political leadership disagreeing with the Vatican.
Top-ranking Catholic Democrats have also squared off with the Church, most notably over their stances on abortion rights. Francis called Biden’s support for abortion rights an “incoherence.” And the archbishop of San Francisco barred former Speaker Nancy Pelosi from receiving Holy Communion within his archdiocese for the same reason — a spat Pelosi brought all the way up to the Vatican.
During his trip, Vance is not expected to meet with Francis, who has met with Trump and with Biden when he was vice president. The pope is not expected to lead this year’s Easter services, but has made some public appearances and met privately last week with King Charles and Queen Camilla.
The fissure points to a wider gap between conservative Catholics in the U.S. and Francis, a fierce immigration advocate.
Trump has nominated CatholicVote’s president, Brian Burch, to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. Burch, who the Senate has not yet confirmed and who declined to comment, has repeatedly criticized Francis’ leadership.
“Is there a division? Absolutely. Anybody would be dishonest to pretend there’s not,” Cortes said, adding: “Catholics all over the country agree overwhelmingly with JD Vance’s version of what immigration policy should look like, rather than what these Church leaders are advocating for.”
Vance tackled that division in a 2020 article, written after he published his memoir Hillbilly Elegy but before announcing his Senate bid, about his conversion journey.
“My growing view is that too many American Catholics have failed to show proper deference to the papacy,” he wrote, “treating the pope as a political figure to be criticized or praised according to their whims.”
By IRIE SENTNER/Politico
