Whether you are for or against him, JD Vance is bringing Catholic social teaching to national attention
Charles Collins/Crux• February 1, 2025
Say what you will about the first two weeks of US president Donald Trump’s second term in office, which has seen a blizzard of presidential executive orders and is now handling the fallout of the tragic midair collision in the US capital, it has also certainly put the spotlight on Catholic social teaching.
That’s largely due to the words of Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019.
Before becoming a senator of Ohio in 2023, Vance was most famous for his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, published in 2016 and adapted for the screen in 2020. The book spoke about his small-town upbringing in the Appalachia, including his relationship with his troubled but conservative, evangelical Protestant family.
Ever since Vance converted, he has been vocal about his Catholicism. Vance has also been and frank in his acknowledgment of how the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo, the North African bishop who lived from 354-430 and is universally recognised as the greatest of the Church’s Latin Doctors, have influenced him.
In a 29 January interview on Fox News, Vance spoke about the Trump policy on illegal immigration, and noted the president’s plan to deport millions of people didn’t conflict with his religious beliefs.
“There’s this old school – and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way – that you love your family and then you love your neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world,” the vice president said.
“A lot of the far Left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society,” Vance said.
“And I think the profound difference that Donald Trump brings to the leadership of this country is the simple concept of America First. It doesn’t mean you hate anybody else; it means that you have leadership – and President Trump has been very clear about this – that puts the interests of American citizens first.
“In the same way that the British prime minister should care about Brits and the French should care about the French, we have an American president who cares primarily about Americans, and that’s a very welcome change,” Vance said.
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Vance’s comments have drawn both stark rebukes and strong defences from Catholic voices in the United States.
Writing on social media platform X, Jesuit Father James Martin replied to the vice president’s interview by saying it misses the point of Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan.
“After Jesus tells a lawyer that you should ‘love your neighbour as yourself,’ the lawyer asks him, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ In response, Jesus tells the story of a Jewish man who has been beaten by robbers and is lying by the side of the road. The man is helped not by those closest to him (a ‘priest’ and a ‘Levite’), but rather by a Samaritan. At the time, Jews and Samaritans would have considered one another enemies,” Martin wrote.
“So Jesus’s fundamental message is that everyone is your neighbour, and that it is not about helping just your family or those closest to you. It’s specifically about helping those who seem different, foreign, other. They are all our ‘neighbours. But Jesus’s deeper point can only be understood from the point of view of the beaten man: our ultimate salvation depends, as it did for that man, upon those whom we often consider to be the ‘stranger’.”
He concludes: “Jesus was often critical of those who would put family first. When Jesus’ own family came from Nazareth to Capernaum to ‘seize’ him, he was told that his mother and brothers were waiting outside a house in which he was preaching. Jesus said, ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?…Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Mt 12:46-50). For Jesus, ties to the Father were more important than family ties. And responsibilities to family took second place to the demands of discipleship.”
Conservatives, however, were quick to point out Vance was just speaking of the ordo amoris – the “hierarchy of love” – an idea most famously articulated by Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
“In matters pertaining to nature, we should love our kindred most; in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens; and on the battlefield, our fellow soldiers,” Aquinas wrote in his Summa Theologica.
Such debates on theological issues haven’t tended to stray into the realm of US politics, even with Catholics in – or one heartbeat away from – the White House. Of course, there haven’t been that many: so far the only two Catholic US presidents were John F. Kennedy and Joe Biden.
While there were complaints about Biden’s policies on abortion, gay marriage, and gender theory, there were few discussions about his abilities in assessing Catholic theology. More often, the debate was on whether he was a “good” or “bad” Catholic.
Trump’s first vice president was Mike Pence, who was raised Catholic, but then started attending an Evangelical church, and later called himself an “Evangelical Catholic”.
Catholics have been discussing the Church’s social doctrine – Catholic social teaching – since Pope Leo XIII published his encyclical letter, Rerum Novarum, in 1891. In much of the world, especially – though by no means exclusively – in traditionally Catholic countries, the Church’s social doctrine has been a major subject of political debate. It continues to be, even in places where the practice of the faith has been in decline for many decades.
Recent popes have written in a way that assumes the relevance of Catholic social teaching for the political life of nations.
In Deus Caritas Est, published 20 years ago, Pope Benedict XVI says the State “must inevitably face the question of how justice can be achieved here and now”.
Just last July in Trieste, Pope Francis said the Social doctrine of the Church “embraces certain dimensions of Christian commitment and a Gospel reading of social phenomena”, adding: “just as the crisis of democracy affects different realities and nations, so too does the attitude of responsibility towards social transformations call all Christians, wherever they live and work, in every part of the world.”
In the United States, however, this Catholic discussion has mostly been confined to Catholic universities and public intellectuals.
So even though there has been a lot of debate between Catholics of differing political affiliations about the second Trump presidency, a surprising development is how this political debate among Catholics is actually becoming so…Catholic.
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Photo: US Vice President JD Vance joins President Donald Trump for a news conference about the collision of an American Airlines flight with a military helicopter near Ronald Reagan National Airport in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Washington, DC, USA. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)