JD Vance’s deep Catholic faith means he won’t hit back at new Pope Leo XIV’s bitter criticism of the MAGA movement and his views on immigration, the vice-president’s British mentor told today.
Cambridge academic Dr James Orr has revealed his friend has no desire to enter into a ‘theological cage fight’ with the new Bishop of Rome.
‘He will be praying regularly for the new Pope. He will be willing him to succeed’, he said.
‘Vance will accept Pope Leo XIV. The Vice President will simply say: “Well, okay. The Pope, in his private capacity, doesn’t agree with me on this political question” and I don’t think that will faze him one bit’.
Today it emerged that before becoming Pope Leo XIV, American priest Robert Prevost took aim at JD Vance and a number of key Trump policies in a series of tweets as recently as a few weeks ago.
He even shared several articles that addressed Mr Vance‘s stance on immigration. One of them was titled: ‘JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.’
The new Pope has also had his say on issues from gun control to migration and the death of George Floyd. Steve Bannon, the former White House Chief Strategist, has called him the ‘anti-Trump pope’ while MAGA supporters branded him a ‘piece of s**t’.
Dr Orr, who has been dubbed ‘JD Vance’s English philosopher king’ and the vice-president fondly calls him his ‘UK Sherpa’, has given a unique insight into how the senior Republican will view America’s first pontiff – and when they will meet.
He also revealed that he believes that JD had no time for Pope Francis – despite being one of the last people to see him alive before his death at the age of 88.
‘I think long ago both of us stopped listening to what Francis had to say’, Dr Orr said.
But Dr Orr has claimed that entering into a war-of-words with the Pope will be far from JD Vance’s mind – especially because he is a devout Catholic himself who never misses Mass.
‘Vance is not thinking: “I’ve got a cage match looming with Leo XIV”,’ he said.
‘Like any good Catholic he is perfectly capable of telling the difference between ancient church teaching and the progressive orthodoxies of lefty Latin American boomers.
‘One thing that we won’t see is any criticism from Vance of the new Pope.
‘JD is a very, very dutiful Catholic and he doesn’t miss Mass wherever he is.
‘He’s a very devout Catholic. He’s an adult convert, and adult converts are serious about their faith.
‘They haven’t been brought up in that faith- they’ve consciously decided, he consciously decided, in his mid-thirties to become a Catholic’.
Dr Orr and Vice-President Vance are close friends who first met around seven years ago through mutual friends.
They were together when the President was shot in Pennsylvania last July.
They also dined at the Senate in Washington DC just before Mr Vance was called to Mar-a-Lago and asked to be Mr Trump’s running mate and text and chat on the phone regularly.
Dr Orr has said that his friend will want to meet the Pope – but not before his boss.
‘I think President Trump will want to meet him first. Then Vance. And I suspect it would be in Rome.
He added ‘Pope Leo will want to stay in Rome as much as possible, but not least because because he’s probably conscious of the fact that he’s a new American pope, and if he’s traipsing off to the White House, I think there’ll be a sort of standoff: “who’s paying homage to who?”.’
Dr Orr has predicted that the Pope is unlikely to criticise the Trump administration on social media any longer. He also believes he ‘will to start with downplay his associations with America’.
‘My sense is, he’s the sort of person who would see that it would be unseemly for somebody in the office that he’s now got to be engaging in theological fights with the Vice President’, he said.
‘People are talking about the fact that he’s American, but he’s the least American of the cardinals. He’s Latin American as well’.
Dr Orr, who is an associate professor of philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, believes that Mr Vance was not keen on the last pope.
‘I have have spoken with him about Francis in the past, but I think both of us long ago stopped listening to what Francis had to say’, he said.
‘If you look back at those extraordinary visits that Pope John Paul II had to Poland and to Czechoslovakia.
‘Speaking up for his native land, speaking up for Poland, saying, it’s good to be patriotic, and against what the Soviet Union is doing. Quenching this love of nation.
‘My sense is, Vance is with John Paul II. Not Francis’.
Dr Orr has suggested there is a paradox when it comes to the new Pope’s views, especially on immigration and abortion.
‘I believe he [the new pope] is staunchly pro-life. I think at one point, if I’m not mistaken, he implied that American politicians who are pro-choice and don’t respect the sanctity of life from womb to tomb should be excommunicated and should not receive communion.
‘On that issue he seems extremely conservative and far more conservative than the ordinary MAGA member. There’s a strange paradox there.
‘And yet politically I think the new Pope is much more inclined to be progressive on the issue of immigration’.
He went on to say that JD Vance believes that ‘open borders is not a Christian position’.
‘I think the overwhelming weight of the Catholic tradition, including Augustine and Aquinas, is with Vance, not with the new Pope’, he added.
Dr Orr says his choice of name brings hope for his papacy.
‘He is harking back to Leo XIII, obviously. He was an extraordinary pope, my favorite Pope, in fact.
‘He wrote Aeterni Patris, which effectively rehabilitated the legacy of Thomas Aquinas. You’ve got this weird situation where the theological heavyweights who support Vance’s view are most associated with a new Pope, who was twice head of the Augustinian order’.
MAGA politicos in the US have unleashed a barrage of blistering attacks against the new American pope after he overcame startling odds to be selected as pontiff yesterday.
Vocal figures immediately rejected him as head of the Catholic Church, branding Prevost a ‘liberal piece of s**t’ and a ‘Marxist’ amid a deepening schism on the Right.
Prevost did reportedly vote in the Illinois Republican primaries in 2012, 2014 and 2016. But his papacy may yet lead the church away from Trump Republicanism.
Podcaster Joey Mannarino told 600,000 followers the new pope was a ‘liberal piece of s**t’, sharing Prevost’s rebuttal of the Vice President’s reading of ‘ordo amoris’ – a Christian concept of ‘rightly ordered love’ that made waves earlier this year.
Vance had said in an interview with Fox News in January: ‘There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then, after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.’
Critics judged that Vance, a Catholic, had misread Thomas Aquinas’ idea of the ‘order of love’, accusing him of using the concept to support political ideology.
While Vance, a Catholic, was careful to congratulate the new pontiff, Trump-aligned commentators were less choice with their words.