WASHINGTON — Vice President J.D. Vance told a gathering of Catholics Friday that “foreign misadventures” have led to “the eradication of historical Christian communities” worldwide.
Vance, a practicing Catholic, addressed a crowd of more than 1,000 people gathered at the 20th annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. While Vance attended the annual event last year in his capacity as a U.S. senator, this marked his first time partaking in the event as vice president. He took office with President Donald Trump last month.
“We have turned a new page in Washington, D.C. and we are going to take advantage of the opportunity that God has given us,” he said. “President Trump, though not a Catholic himself, has been an incredibly good president for Catholics in the United States of America.”
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He touted Trump’s domestic policies on religious liberty and abortion, contrasting it with those of the Biden administration. Vance claimed Trump’s foreign policy is the “most in accord with Christian social teaching and with the Catholic faith.”
“More than any president of my lifetime, President Trump has pursued a path of peace,” Vance proclaimed.
“We very often, I think, ignore the way in which our foreign policy is either an instrument or an impediment to people all over the world being able to practice their faith.”
Vance noted how Christians are often the most persecuted religious group globally.
“The Trump administration promises you whether it’s here at home with our own citizens or all over the world, we will be the biggest defenders of religious liberty and the rights of conscience,” he said.
“It’s not enough simply to protect the rights of conscience, to pursue funding opportunities and grant-making opportunities to protect the rights of people to engage in religious conscience.”
He said that often “the biggest impediments to religious liberty have not come through malice from the United States government but have actually come through carelessness.”
“In the United States of America sometimes, it is our foreign misadventures that lead to the eradication of historical Christian communities all over the world,” he lamented.
He described such “foreign misadventures” as what he is “most ashamed about.”
“When President Trump talks about the need to bring peace, whether it’s in Russia and Ukraine, whether it’s in the Middle East, we, of course, have to recognize that as a policy-oriented towards saving lives and carrying out one of Christ’s most important commandments.”
At the same time, he highlighted the need to recognize the policy as “an effort to protect the religious liberty of Christians because over the past 40 years, it has often been the historical Christian communities who bear the brunt of failed American foreign policy.”
“That is, in my view, perhaps the most important way in which Donald Trump has been a defender of Christian rights all over the world is he has a foreign policy that is oriented towards peace,” Vance proclaimed.
“We will always listen to people of faith and people of conscience in the United States of America,” he added, vowing to do so “even and especially maybe when you disagree with us.”
Vance said he was the first convert to Catholicism to ever serve as vice president of the U.S., identifying himself as a “baby Catholic.”
“What attracted me to the Christian faith and what attracted me to this church in particular is the recognition that grace is not something that happens instantaneously,” he said.
“It’s something that God works in us over a long period of time, sometimes many years and sometimes many decades. I think that when I was a kid, my assumption is that grace is something where the Holy Spirit would come in and it would solve all of our problems.”
The vice president said he “learned he hard way as a Catholic” that “grace is very much a process that God works in us over time.”
Calling himself “as imperfect a Christian as any person in this room,” Vance said, “God is transforming me every single day.”
Vance credited his Catholic faith with helping him realize 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,” he said. “The real measure of health in a society is the safety and stability and the health of our families and of our people.”
Although he projected confidence that the Trump administration would end up “producing prosperity,” Vance said, “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.”
“There have been times in the past where … the GDP numbers were maybe moving in the right direction, where the stock market was moving in the right direction but the United States of America was losing life expectancy,” he explained.
“I think that what the Catholic Church calls me to do is to say that if the stock market’s doing OK but people are literally dying and losing years off of their life, then we have to do better as a country,” he added. “Catholicism, Christianity at its root, I think, teaches our public officials to care about the deep things, the important things, the protection of the unborn, the flourishing of our children, and the health and the sanctity of our marriages.”
Vance also discussed how his 7-year-old son chose to be baptized a week after the election, saying it was the “thing that I was most excited about in November of 2024.”
As a compromise with his Hindu wife, Usha, Vance said the couple will raise their kids Catholic but “will let them choose the moment that they want to ultimately become baptized.”
He concluded his address by offering well wishes and a prayer for Pope Francis, who has been hospitalized for two weeks. He pointed to a homily the pontiff gave in March 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as his fondest memory of the religious leader.
Vance read aloud from the homily, where Francis discussed how “the storm exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and our priorities.”
He said Francis’ assertion that “we deprive ourselves of the antibodies we need to confront adversity” was the strongest takeaway from the homily, committing to become “the kind of leader … who helps our shared civilization build those true antibodies against adversity.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
