Pope Leo XIV’s old posts don’t seem to have fazed Vice President JD Vance who congratulated the pontiff on his new election Thursday.
“Congratulations to Leo XIV, the first American Pope, on his election” Vance wrote on X. “I’m sure millions of American Catholics and other Christians will pray for his successful work leading the Church. May God bless him!”
The pontiff criticized Vance in a social media post only a few months ago in February, following comments he made on Christianity and immigration on Fox News.
JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others https://t.co/hDKPKuMXmu via @NCRonline
— Robert Prevost (@drprevost) February 3, 2025
“JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” Pope Leo XIV wrote on his X profile as Cardinal Robert Prevost, quoting and linking to an article from the National Catholic Reporter rebuking Vance’s comments.
In late January, Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, had tried to argue that a teaching, “ordo amoris,” which speaks about the order of love, justified the Trump’s administration’s hostile crackdown on immigrants in the United States.
“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,” Vance said in the Jan. 29 interview with Fox News. “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”
The late Pope Francis was notably critical of the Trump administration’s stance on immigration, and penned an open letter to U.S. bishops following Vance’s interview explaining “ordo amoris” and subsequently correcting the vice president’s comments.
“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings!” the former pontiff wrote.
“The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the Good Samaritan… that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” he continued.
“But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.”
The first American pope, Pope Leo XIV hails from Chicago and is also a Peruvian citizen having previously served as the Archbishop of Chiclayo, Peru.
His digital footprint reveals a disapproval of some of President Donald Trump’s policies during his first term as well, retweeting a post from Cardinal Cupich in 2018 that read: “There is nothing remotely Christian, American, or morally defensible about a policy that takes children away from their parents and warehouses them in cages. This is being carried out in our name and the shame is on us all.”
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