When Vice President JD Vance releases his book “Communion” in June – 304 pages about how his newfound Catholic faith changed his life – he will do so as the second-highest official in an administration in open conflict with America’s first pope.
On Sunday, just weeks after Vance announced his new book, Trump did something unprecedented in the history of the American presidency: In a lengthy Truth Social post, the president took aim at Pope Leo XIV, calling him “terrible,” “weak,” and bad for the church. “I don’t want a pope who criticizes the president of the United States,” he wrote, adding: “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” Two hours later, Trump posted an AI-generated image that appeared to depict him as Jesus Christ – an interpretation the White House has since rejected.
Aboard the pope’s plane to Algiers on Monday, according to the National Catholic Register, Leo responded: “I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or of proclaiming loudly the message of the Gospel. That’s what I’m called to do, what the church is called to do.”
Trump’s attack divides the base
The backlash from Trump’s own following to the president’s posts was intense and immediate. But Trump’s broadside had broader consequences than mere online outrage. It exposed a structural contradiction at the heart of American conservative Catholicism: the ancient, never-resolved tension between devotion to God and devotion to power—and the impossibility of ultimately serving both.
In doing so, Trump has set a theological trap that no political maneuver can escape – and in which the most powerful Catholics in his own government now sit. To appreciate their full weight, one need only look at Trump’s inner circle, whose members face an impossible dilemma between theological conviction and political loyalty.
At last year’s National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, JD Vance led attendees in prayer for the ailing Pope Francis and described himself as a “baby Catholic.” But since his baptism at a Dominican priory in Cincinnati in 2019 — the conclusion of years of engagement with Augustine, Girard and the church’s moral philosophy — Vance has become one of the most publicly visible Catholic figures in American political life.
Vance and the Pope
There is a version of Vance — the one that exists in the pages of The Lamp, a Catholic literary magazine, in a 2020 essay called “How I Joined the Resistance” — that would have been horrified by what transpired this week. This Vance wrote of a late-night conversation at a hotel bar with a conservative Catholic intellectual who had criticized the pope: “My growing conviction is that too many American Catholics have failed to show due respect to the papacy and have treated the pope as a political figure whom they can criticize or praise at will.”
Six years later, Vance is exactly one of those Catholics—he has long since traded “due respect for the papacy” for a boldness that only the Trump administration seems capable of.
Last year, in an interview with CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Vance accused the U.S. bishops’ conference of putting its “business model” above humanitarian considerations after the USCCB released a statement condemning the Trump administration’s tightened immigration policies. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York called the accusation “defamatory” and “untrue,” and Vance has since apologized.
Vance goes further
Since Trump’s posts on Sunday evening, Vance has gone a step further, stating on Fox News that “it would be best if the Vatican limited itself to questions of morality” and that the President of the United States should “determine” American domestic policy. At a Turning Point USA event in Georgia on Tuesday, he said the pope should “be careful when speaking about theological issues.”
An attitude that is now leading him, along with other high-ranking Catholic officials in the government, in lockstep with Trump, into the worst US Vatican crisis in modern history.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s writing is more doctrinally sophisticated than Vance’s. In his 2012 memoir, “An American Son,” he wrote of his return to the Catholic faith as an adult: “I literally longed for the Blessed Sacrament, Holy Communion—the sacramental point of contact between the Catholic and the liturgy of heaven.” At a press conference at the State Department last May, he delivered perhaps the most theologically explicit acknowledgment of papal authority ever made by a sitting American official.
Rubio’s theological balancing act
“I believe that the Pope is the successor of Peter, appointed by the apostolic succession and the work of the Holy Spirit through the cardinals. He is the rock, and on this rock he built the Church.”
Three days before Trump’s online comments sparked outrage, Rubio gave a speech to Catholic scholars in which he argued that America embodies “the renewal of a deeper civilizational heritage rooted in the Christian moral order” and declared that whoever looks at America’s history sees “the face of God.”
But Rubio has long maintained a careful separation of the spheres and sometimes resorts to the ideological loophole that the Pope is “infallible in matters of faith and morals, not in politics, science or economics.” The dilemma for Rubio: He formulates the doctrine of apostolic succession with precision and conviction, but at the same time tries to insulate the pope’s moral authority from his own political decisions.
Despite the White House’s assertions that the pope was treading on political territory, Leo’s comments fell squarely within the boundaries of war, human dignity and the ethics of violence – what the Catholic Church has always defined as matters of faith and morals. Rubio’s careful balancing act doesn’t work against a pope who refuses to be divided.
Homan and the church
Rubio has not yet commented on Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo. Others around Trump have shown less restraint.
Border Commissioner Tom Homan, arguably the government’s most abrasive and openly confrontational official with papal authority, is a born Catholic who, according to Commonweal magazine, attended a parish of the Augustinian Order – the same order that educated the future Pope Leo XIV at Villanova University at the same time. To a certain extent, Homan and Leo were shaped by the same order, in the same era, in the same spiritual tradition. Nevertheless, Homan made a habit of claiming his own Catholicism as legitimacy to challenge papal authority.
When the late Pope Francis called mass deportations “a disgrace” last January, Homan responded from the White House press briefing room, according to The Hill:
“I have harsh words for the Pope. I say this as a lifelong Catholic. I was baptized as a Catholic, received first communion as a Catholic, was confirmed as a Catholic. He should get the Catholic Church in order and concentrate on his work and leave border control to us.”
In February, Homan offered to personally brief the pope on the intricacies of immigration policy: “I would like to sit down and explain it to him. The Catholic faith always supports law enforcement. Always. And he should do that,” adding, “They’d better fix the Catholic Church, because it has its own problems.”
Silence in the inner circle
This week, Homan told reporters about Leo and the church: “I wish they would stay out of immigration policy. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Other Catholics close to Trump – including Elbridge Colby, Secretary of Defense, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Brian Burch, the US Ambassador to the Holy See and long-time President of CatholicVote – have all not commented on Trump’s rift with the Pope.
It would be a mistake to read what has transpired between the Vatican and the White House over the past 18 months as a series of gaffes or gaffes. In Trump’s slipstream, Catholics in his administration had to choose between their pope and a president whose agenda is an affront to the “message of the Gospel” that Pope Leo says he and the church are called to proclaim.
For decades, appeals to papal and magisterial authority served conservative Catholics as a reliable instrument of political discipline – a mechanism for drawing clear lines between authentic Catholics and so-called “cafeteria Catholics.” Now it’s turned on them, and the question that Trump raised in public is one that American conservative Catholicism has never had to answer neatly: What happens when one’s theological framework becomes the instrument used to dismantle one’s political identity?
The silence from Trump’s Catholic inner circle was so complete that it was left to House Speaker Mike Johnson – a Baptist – to provide the administration’s most explicit defense.
Johnson and the Just War Theory
At a news conference on Thursday, Johnson suggested that Pope Leo did not fully understand “something called the just war doctrine” – by which he meant the ancient theological framework on the ethics of warfare in Christian theology. Leo, however, is an Augustinian monk who served as Prior General of the Augustinian Order for twelve years – as the global head of his own Order of St. Augustine. The just war theory was developed by this same Augustine.
“A pope or a religious leader can say whatever he wants,” Johnson said at a press briefing on Thursday, “but when you go into political waters you should obviously expect a political reaction. And I think the pope got some of that.”
Pope Leo, meanwhile, was at a cathedral in Bamenda, Cameroon, addressing a war-torn community. He also made it clear once again that he is not afraid of Trump’s criticism, writing on
