Having grown up Catholic, gone to Catholic school, and attended Catholic mass as recently as October, I feel proud today.
My pride (the good kind, properly distinguished from self-admiration) stems not from Thursday’s selection of Pope Leo XIV as the first-ever American pope but from the magnanimity exhibited by a much greater man than the erstwhile Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost: Vice President J.D. Vance.
Thursday on the social media platform X, Vance ignored the new pope’s recent criticism toward him and President Donald Trump — not to mention a long history of cringeworthy wokeness — by taking the high road and congratulating the pontiff.
“Congratulations to Leo XIV, the first American Pope, on his election! I’m sure millions of American Catholics and other Christians will pray for his successful work leading the Church. May God bless him!” Vance wrote.
Congratulations to Leo XIV, the first American Pope, on his election! I’m sure millions of American Catholics and other Christians will pray for his successful work leading the Church. May God bless him!
— JD Vance (@JDVance) May 8, 2025
In short, Vance chose true liberality and humanity. That, among other things, makes the vice president a better man than me.
The selection of Pope Leo XIV had social media users scrambling to uncover Prevost’s X posts. To those of us who have come to expect the worst of woke liberal clerics, those posts did not disappoint.
For instance, last month the new pope reposted a post critical of the Trump administration’s deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The innocent “Maryland Man” of liberals’ imaginations, Garcia actually was an illegal immigrant who has faced very credible allegations of wife-beating, not to mention connections to human smuggling and a vicious foreign gang.
Was this a good response from J.D. Vance?
Garcia, of course, will never trouble the pontiff behind Vatican walls.
Likewise, in February, Prevost reposted a story about Vance, criticizing the vice president for asserting that we have a duty to love our families above strangers.
“JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” Prevost wrote at the time.
So open borders means “love,” according to the new pope. From behind the safety of Vatican walls, that kind of assertion might strike the reader as hypocritical — to say the least.
In 2020, Prevost also reposted some woke drivel about George Floyd and “racism.”
Of course, the new pope also has strong and admirable pro-life sensibilities. But that hardly distinguishes him from someone like Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another pro-life elitist who never endures the consequences of her judicial opinions.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that in October I walked out of my Catholic church the moment the priest began lecturing the congregation about anti-immigrant rhetoric. In that case he had the much-publicized Ohio Haitians in mind.
On the other hand, my own family has deep connections to the Catholic church. A beloved great aunt, who passed away at 95 in January, spent 80 years of her life as a nun. No one ever more consistently reflected the spirit of Jesus in the way she lived.
This commentary, therefore, has nothing to do with Catholics or Catholicism. I continue to love and admire both.
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