The vice president says he preferred direct rebukes from Pope Francis to “trite platitudes” from the Vatican officials he met in April 2025, shortly before Francis’s death.
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Vice President JD Vance says his meeting last year with Vatican diplomats in Rome was “unsettling” as they uttered what he describes as “trite platitudes” and “clichés,” adding that he preferred the direct rebukes offered by Pope Francis.
His account of the April 2025 meeting with Vatican officials, which preceded a brief Easter morning visit the next day with Francis just before the pope’s death, is an element of Vance’s new book, set to be released Tuesday.
The Washington Post obtained a copy of the book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” which details Vance’s journey from evangelical Christianity in his childhood to atheism in young adulthood, and then his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2019.
Francis died less than 24 hours after meeting with Vance, who had stopped in Italy on his way to India with his wife and three children.
The vice president’s criticism of Vatican officials in his new book contrasts with his favorable accounts of both Francis and Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born pope. His account follows efforts by U.S. and Vatican officials to downplay tensions between the two sides as they’ve disagreed over the last year and a half on matters of immigration and war.
Vance’s criticism is that the Vatican officials were too diplomatic and unwilling to talk in specifics about the subjects on which the U.S. and the Holy See disagreed.
After discussing the wars in Ukraine and Gaza in their meeting, Vance wrote, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state and top diplomat, brought up migration. Vance criticized the Vatican officials for taking a “generic” position on migration and making the meeting “unsettling” — saying the Vatican acknowledged the United States’ right to control its own borders while encouraging the Trump administration to treat migrants humanely.
“Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes,” Vance wrote, adding that the diplomats “never specified” what exactly they took issue with on the administration’s immigration policies.
He acknowledged that the diplomats probably avoided specifics “out of a desire to be, well, diplomatic,” but wrote that their comments were “too abstract to be helpful.”
Vance added he was “struck that one of the few institutions with the moral authority and global perspective to address the migration question seemed so afraid of saying something controversial that it chose, effectively, to say nothing at all.”
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Looming over the Saturday morning meeting was the question of whether Francis, who was gravely ill and had offered pointed criticism of Vance and the Trump administration in the preceding months, would meet with the new vice president.
Vance wrote that Vatican and American diplomats alike “were clearly worried about whether it would be seen as a snub if the meeting [with Francis] fell through,” and that he “felt awful” about the stress it was causing.
“Please tell Pope Francis that I pray for him every day, and that he should feel under no pressure to see me. I wish him well,” Vance told Vatican staff the night before, when he attended a Good Friday Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica and a priest pulled him aside to say the pope had yet to make a decision about whether he was “up to it.”
Francis, who was set to preside over what became his final Easter Mass that Sunday, did not appear at the Saturday meeting. But on Easter morning, Vance wrote, he “received a text message telling me that the Pope would like to see me.”
During the 15-minute ride to Vatican City from the ambassador’s residence where he was staying in Rome, Vance said he felt “unusually nervous.”
The meeting would be quicker than the car ride there — lasting “maybe 10 minutes at most,” Vance wrote. Francis was “more fragile than I realized,” Vance wrote, and the vice president “felt even worse that he had forced himself out of bed early to meet with me.”
After exchanging pleasantries with Francis, who gave gifts for his children, Vance said he called the second lady, Usha Vance, from the car.
“It’s sad. He’s in very bad shape,” Vance recalled saying. “But he was very kind.”
The next day, after he arrived in India, Vance learned the news of the pope’s death in a message from one of his Catholic staffers. “Pope Francis died,” the staffer wrote.
“We had different jobs, and I preferred his specific exhortations to the vagueness I had encountered during our Vatican meeting,” Vance said of Francis and his at times public disagreements with him. “Better to have an honest conversation than one masked by clichés.”
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