J.D. Vance Goes After His Own Church on Immigration

J.D. Vance at the national prayer service where Trump felt disrespected by the Episcopal bishop of Washington. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

For the most overtly Christian administration since George W. Bush’s, the second Trump administration is off to a very bad start when it comes to respect for Christian clergy, at least when they aren’t leading cheers for the 47th president and his agenda. After her sermon at the national prayer service shortly after the inauguration, Donald Trump went medieval on Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, for having the temerity to beg him to have mercy for those who fear his policies. Now J.D. Vance is openly feuding with the hierarchy of his own Roman Catholic Church for its hostility to Team Trump’s mass-deportation plans.

Catholic advocacy for immigrants is a long-standing commitment, particularly in the United States, where a significant percentage of immigrants dating back to the Irish famine have been Catholics. It’s one issue (unlike many others) on which traditionalists and modernizers in the Church are in agreement, which has led to a lot of friction recently with right-wing political movements in Europe and the U.S. On the very eve of Trump’s inauguration, Pope Francis, who has never been much of a MAGA fan, called Trump’s mass-deportation plan “disgraceful” because “it makes the poor wretches who have nothing pay the bill.” Even earlier, the pontiff caused a stir by making an outspoken champion of migrants’ rights, Cardinal Robert McElroy, the archbishop of Washington. Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, himself a conservative Catholic, fired a brushback pitch at the Vatican, suggesting Francis “ought to stick to the Catholic Church and fix that. That’s a mess.”

But now Vice-President Vance, America’s highest ranking Catholic, has joined the fray after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops strongly objected to an executive order exposing to enforcement raids schools and churches that offer refugees shelter and services. Not mincing words, Vance suggested to Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation that the Church’s advocacy for undocumented immigrants is essentially a money grab:

I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?

The bishops wasted no time in responding to Vance, noting that the expenses associated with their care for refugees far outstrip the compensation they receive from the federal government.

Vance is a recent convert to Catholicism with strong ties to hypertraditionalists in the church who are often rebellious toward Francis, as are some bishops. But again, sympathy for immigrants, rooted in Jesus’s many biblical injunctions to care for “strangers,” is not a topic that tends to divide the clergy. Vance is probably on stronger ground with Catholics in the pews: The Trump-Vance ticket won self-identified Catholics by an estimated 10 percent in 2024 after running even with Joe Biden (the first Catholic president since JFK) in 2020.

Still, clergy bashing isn’t a great look for this administration, particularly since there are signs of anti-Trump solidarity across confessional lines. The editors of the National Catholic Register had this to say about MAGA attacks on Bishop Budde:

What Budde did wasn’t just taking advantage of an opportune encounter with the commander in chief. What she did was something she was obliged to do as a disciple of Christ preaching the Christian message. She gave a human face to those who, in the approach of a heartless administration, are a faceless group, shamefully maligned and made into a national scapegoat. They have become the new enemy, the inhuman “other” upon which our social ills and anxieties have been heaped …

If a Christian leader in her pulpit, addressing a president who voluntarily placed himself in that sacred space, cannot speak out of the heart of the Gospel, then we might as well turn our cathedrals, basilicas and other houses of worship into museums. 

If the war of words between the Trump administration and religious leaders over immigration policy continues to escalate, it will raise some uncomfortable questions about the loyalties of observant Christians like Vance. Conservatives Catholics like to mock those who reject church dogma on subjects like birth control and abortion as “cafeteria Catholics,” who pick and choose the teachings they will follow. Vance is rejecting Catholic teachings on the dignity owed to refugees to the extent of accusing his church of corrupt motives for resisting a deportation program that relies on terror and violates sacred spaces in search of its victims. The vice-president is genuflecting to the false god of nativism.