The vice president, who converted to Catholicism at age 35, doesn’t remember apologizing to the president’s favorite bishop for his false statements about the Catholic Church, but he does remember lecturing the top cardinal about integrity.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the former archbishop of New York who delivered the invocation at both of President Donald Trump’s inaugurations, said last month that Vance had later privately retracted remarks where he accused the Catholic church of profiting from immigrants during a one-on-one conversation.
In an interview with The Washington Post published Wednesday, Vance said he hadn’t spoken to Dolan “in detail” for at least six months, and that he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said on the subject.
“I’m not saying he’s lying,” he said.
Vance made headlines shortly after joining the White House in January 2025 by laying into the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for their criticism of President Donald Trump’s executive order allowing immigration raids at schools and churches.
At the time, the newly-minted vice president claimed the church was only standing up for immigrants because it was profiting off of them.
While Vance didn’t remember any of his own contrition, what Vance did remember was telling Dolan the bishops needed to “be careful your financial interests and the immigration issue don’t actually cloud your judgment,” he said.
Vance also admitted that sometimes he “says things too harshly” or “too directly,” and that he “could have made that comment more carefully without going too hard” at church leadership.
“I’m sure I said something like that, but I don’t remember exactly what I said,” he added.
Dolan, however, remembered the vice president being far more contrite.
“He and I had a little tete-a-tete, you probably know, when he suggested that bishops in the United States were pro-immigrant because we were making money,” he told EWTN News. “And he apologized. He said, ‘That was out of line, and that’s not true.’”
Dolan had blasted the comments as “scurrilous,” “very nasty,” and “inaccurate” at the time.
The vice president, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 and calls himself a “baby Catholic,” had urged bishops to “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?”
Other members of the Trump administration have also taken it upon themselves to “explain” the Catholic faith to church officials in response to Pope Leo XIV’s outspoken criticism of Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Border czar and “lifelong Catholic” Tom Homan blasted Pope Leo XIV’s supposed failure to support law enforcement, while House Speaker Mike Johnson, a devout Southern Baptist, tried to make the biblical case for strong borders.
In December, Pope Leo, who was born and raised in Chicago, replaced Dolan, a prominent figure known for engaging in culture wars who serves on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, with a relatively unknown Illinois-based bishop, Ronald Hicks, who has a history of being pro-migrant.
Pope Leo has also heavily criticized the Trump presidency, including the deadly unauthorized war in Iran, and will snub the U.S. this year by not visiting his home country.
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