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Vice President Vance deftly de-escalates conflict with Pope Francis at National Catholic Prayer Breakfast

Published

March 2, 2025

We will save the Ukraine stuff for another time. Today, I want to address the worldview present in Vance’s speech. Call it Vanceism. Or the Vance Doctrine. A more specific subset of the populist nationalism that many have struggled to define since Trump first came down the escalator in 2015—and a more Catholic one. To the extent that Trumpism is a hodgepodge of often conflicting ideological tendencies—tech bro transhumanism mixed in with anti-woke libertarianism and Manosphere podcasters—Vanceism is the particular strain of Trumpism that Catholics should be rooting for.

Let’s stop there for a moment before proceeding to the good stuff. Vance did not name those disagreements. But we should. Up until February 18th, pro-lifers could have drawn a distinction between the bad things the Trump-Vance campaign had said and the good things the Trump-Vance Administration has done (see leftist tears here). But with his Feb. 18th executive order on IVF, it seems that Trump intends to carry out the bad promises too. And no, that Trump upset liberal media outlets by not magically making IVF free with one stroke of his executive pen is small comfort. More disturbing still is the line in this story:

If the arc of your political journey has been anything like mine, you know what Vance means. ISIS wiping out indigenous Christian communities in the Middle East ten years ago—the indirect result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq another ten years before that—helped turn me toward a Pat Buchanan-like direction on U.S. foreign policy. Even more so, the way the neocons of the early 21st century were ambivalent about—or supportive of—the redefinition of marriage—and the rise of cancel culture and wokeness that came in its wake. Some neocons did oppose it, to be sure. But by the mid 2010s, it was clear that their opposition was mere window dressing compared to their real passion: an interventionist U.S. foreign policy, whatever the costs.

The second thing that I take from my Catholic faith is a recognition that the deepest and most important things are not material. They’re not GDP. They’re not the numbers that we see in the stock market. The real measure of health in a society is the safety and stability and the health of our families, and of our people. We are in the business, in President Trump’s administration, of producing prosperity, but that prosperity is a means to an end. And that end is the flourishing, hopefully, of the life of every single citizen in the United States of America.

I recognize very much that I am a “baby Catholic”—that there are things about the faith that I don’t know. So I try to be humble as best I can when I talk about the faith and publicly, because of course, I’m not always going to get it right… But what I try to remind myself of is that we are not called as Christians to obsess over every social media controversy that implicates the Catholic Church, whether it involves a clergy or a bishop or the Holy Father himself…. Sometimes we should let this stuff play out a little bit and try to live our faith as best we can under the dictates of our faith and under the dictates of our spiritual leaders, but not hold them to the standards of social media influencers because they’re not.

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Vice President Vance deftly de-escalates conflict with Pope Francis at National Catholic Prayer Breakfast

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