The vice president will meet with the Vatican secretary of state after sparring with Pope Francis on family, charity, and the limits of open-border ideology.
VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — U.S. Vice President JD Vance is set to visit the Vatican this week and meet the secretary of state.
Press details published April 16 gave sparse updates about the vice president’s upcoming calendar, listing his trip to both India and Rome.
The note did not give precise dates, simply saying that he would be traveling to Italy and India with his family “from April 18 to April 24.”
During the respective visits he will “discuss shared economic and geopolitical priorities with leaders in each country.”
While in Italy and the Vatican City State, Vance will meet with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and then with the Vatican’s Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin. It is unlikely a formal meeting with Pope Francis will be advertised, given the Pope's convalescence; however, Francis has been much more public in recent days, so a surprise meeting is not to be ruled out.
There were no details about Vance's possible involvement in any of the Holy Week ceremonies.
In recent weeks, Bloomberg had first reported that the vice president would be in Rome between April 18 through April 20, namely Good Friday until Easter Sunday, though it went unconfirmed by official channels.
Vance is a Catholic, having converted and receiving baptism in August 2019 at the hands of a Dominican priest in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Conversing with his friend and author Rod Dreher, Vance said, “I became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true.”
Vance cited being moved by St. Augustine’s Confessions and City of God, which prompted his decision to take the saint as his baptismal patron.
The U.S.’s most high-profile lay Catholic has come into debate with Catholic bishops in the U.S. and the Vatican since being inaugurated into office.
Earlier this year Pope Francis issued a blistering letter, appearing as a direct rebuff to both President Donald Trump’s policies to tackle illegal immigration and JD Vance’s comments about the “ordo amoris.”
Francis took direct aim at Vance about the “ordo amoris” – the Catholic teaching on a hierarchy or order of charity which starts with God, the family, and spreads eventually to the wider world – a principle defended and outlined by the Greek philosophers and Catholic theologians such as Sts. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
READ: JD Vance defends traditional Catholic teaching on immigration, sparking leftist outrage
Repeatedly referring to the “infinite dignity” of man, Francis appeared to suggest that, based on this dignity, all people should be loved to the same degree and in the same way, thus defending his principle that the same dignity should be the principle behind having widely permissive immigration policies. He wrote:
Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings!
The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf.Lk10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.
While Vance defended the principle of having charity for one’s family and neighbors before the wider community and world, Francis stated that “worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.”
Highlighting the Vatican’s debate with Vance, papal confidant and biographer Austen Ivereigh suggested that Vance might have a meeting with the Pope to receive “a little paternal guidance on the true order of loves in the light of the Good Samaritan.”
The Trump administration’s decision to widely cut federal funding has also launched the regime into conflict with the U.S. bishops. Speaking at the 2025 International Religious Freedom Summit, Vance lamented: “How did America get to the point where we’re sending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars abroad to NGOs that are dedicated to spreading atheism all over the globe?”
However, despite Vance’s trumpeting of his Catholic faith, his involvement in certain aspects of the Trump regime have become problematic from a moral perspective.
Among these is the Trump administration’s recent executive order expanding embryo-destroying in-vitro fertilization (IVF), its opposition to a federal abortion ban, and its at least tacit endorsement of the dangerous abortion pill. In one troubling instance, Vance directly affirmed his support for access to the abortion pill in America.
