Peter Pinedo
Washington DC Newsroom, July 17, 2024 / 17:35 pm
Senator James David “JD” Vance (39), a Republican from Ohio who was newly announced as Donald Trump's running mate in the 2024 election, could become the second Catholic vice president of the United States.
Vance is the second-youngest member of the U.S. Senate and will take office in 2023.
At the age of 35, he was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church at St. Gertrude's Convent, a Dominican monastery in Cincinnati.
In a 2020 article for The Ramp called “On Becoming Catholic with Mamaw,” Vance described his conversion as a “slow and uneven” process that happened over several years.
Vance says his gradual awakening to faith was inspired by the example of his grandmother, “Mamaw,” whom he describes as “a woman of deep but not fully institutionalized faith.”
Vance said he considered himself an atheist after growing up poor in Appalachia, serving four years in the Marines and earning a law degree from Yale University.
Despite coming from a poor family and working his way up the economic and social ladder, Vance was dissatisfied with his life and began to turn increasingly to Christianity, specifically Catholicism.
“I began to wonder: were these worldly markers of success actually making me a better person? I had traded virtue for achievement, only to find the latter inadequate,” he writes. “There was a voice in my head demanding that I do better.”
“I desperately wanted a worldview that understood human bad behavior as social as well as personal, structural as well as moral; a worldview that recognized that humans are products of their environment and have a responsibility to change that environment, but are still moral beings with personal obligations; a worldview in which we could speak out against rising divorce rates and addiction with moral indignation rather than with sanitized conclusions about their negative social externalities.”
Vance writes that he quickly realized that the worldview he was seeking, more than any political philosophy, was one he had known all along: “It was my mama's Christianity.”
“Though my mother was unfamiliar with the liturgy, the influence of Roman and Italian culture, and foreign popes, I gradually came to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her Christian teachings: a Christ-centered faith that demands perfection from us while loving unconditionally and forgiving easily,” he wrote.
Vance said the “Catholic part of my heart” urged him to think about what was really important, to be patient with his son, to control his anger, to value family over income or fame and to forgive those who had hurt him.
“If I wanted to nourish and grow that part of me, I needed to do more than occasionally read theology books and reflect on my shortcomings. I needed to pray more, participate more in the sacramental life of the Church, and publicly confess and repent, no matter how uncomfortable it might be,” he said.
“And I needed grace. In other words, I needed to become a Catholic, not just think.”
In a November 2022 interview with “EWTN News Nightly,” Vance said the history and richness of his Catholic faith is a guiding force in his politics, saying, “One of the great lessons of the Catholic tradition is having public policies that protect life and respect the dignity of the American worker.”
Peter Pinedo is CNA's DC correspondent. A graduate of Franciscan University, Peter previously worked for Texas Right to Life. He is a 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserves.
