Is the Trump White House “Pro-Catholic”?

Astonishingly, the American political order is showing signs of taking the perennial wisdom of our 2,000-year-old Church seriously…

By Robert Moynihan

Vice-President JD Vance and President Donald Trump

Ph.D.; Vaticanist Sandro Magister

In regard to the role and work of Francis, and of the Catholic Church, in the world, a March, 2025 article by the respected Vaticanist Sandro Magister deserves analysis.

Magister, who once studied for the priesthood, then left the seminary to marry and raise a family, writes a widely read weekly column on Church affairs.

In this piece  published March 13, he highlights the perplexing contradictions of the Pope’s relationship with some of the world’s present leaders, including Donald Trump, the president of the United States since January 20, almost two months ago now.

This article should be read because it “touches all the bases,” and in a relatively small space gives you considerable insight into important and sometimes confusing happenings.

Magister’s argument goes like this:

1) Trump was elected on November 5, and some observers are calling it a victory of “Christian nationalists.”

Catholic thinker Patrick Deneen

Essayist Anne Applebaum (in 1994, she published her first book Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, a travelogue that described the rise of nationalism across the new states of the former Soviet Union, says this is the view of Catholic thinker Patrick Deneen, and she suggests Deneen believes that the US should, in fact, be “a religious, not a secular, state.” A dramatic curtain-raiser!

Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears on Fox News on Ash Wednesday

2) Prof. Deneen, Magister notes, is a “guiding light” for Catholic convert JD Vance, the new Vice-President. and also for Marco Rubio, the new Secretary of State under Trump.

So — a powerful Catholic presence in the Trump government… and quite public, as both men wore their Ash Wednesday ashes on their foreheads in public a few days ago…

3) Such public displays of religious practice have become “unthinkable” in Europe, Magister says.

And this separation of social life into a public, secular sphere and a private, religious sphere is what JD Vance publicly criticized in his talk to the European Union leaders in Munich on February 14.

So, Magister argues, this showed the distance between once-Christian Europe (now thoroughly secularized) and the rising Christian religiosity of Vance and Rubio, under Trump’s leadership.

4) Fast forward two weeks later, to February 28, and two events:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

(1) the confrontation in the Oval Office of the White House between the president of Ukraine, Vlodymyr Zelensky, and Trump and Vance, which came only minutes after…

(2) Vance’s talk to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington that same morning.

Pope Francis

Magister noted that Vance spoke kindly about Pope Francis: “A speech in which he moved his hearers by telling of the baptism of his 7-year-old son; he quoted at length the words spoken by Pope Francis at the height of the Covid epidemic in a deserted and rain-beaten St. Peter’s Square; he prayed for his health.”

Vance stressed that this Trump government will “defend religious liberty” worldwide. The point is that…

5) Vance, above all, Magister says, in that speech of his, aimed to “Catholicize” Trump’s moves. Magister writes: “It’s fine to achieve ‘prosperity,’ he (Vance) said, but ‘Catholicism – Christianity at its root, I think – teaches our public officials to care about the deep things, the important things, the protection of the unborn, the flourishing of our children, and the health and the sanctity of our marriages.’”

6) Magister then makes an astonishing remark about his thesis that the Trump administration is “pro-Catholic.”

Magister makes a comparison between this effort to connect the Trump administration with the Catholic Church and something that has happened in… Russia(!).

This is what Magister writes: “There is a curious similarity between this venture, political and religious at once, of which the Catholic Vance is the mastermind, and the axis cemented in Russia between Vladimir Putin and Moscow Patriarch Kirill, under the banner of a ‘holy war’ against the degenerate European civilization.”

Yes, Magister is saying there is a certain “parallel” that he perceives between the proposal of a collaboration between Trump and the Roman Catholic Church and Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church.

(Is this an outrageous comparison? Magister seems to believe it is not…)

7) Few see this, Magister notes, because many issues, the issue of immigration above all, stand in the way of a close collaboration between Trump and the Pope.

And Magister notes that Vance was at pains to overlook these differences and to say that he and his family were praying for the Pope, and were grateful for his words in St. Peter’s Square on March 20, 2020, when Covid was beginning.

Vance even cites a passage from the Pope’s homily on that occasion.

“Vance, In his speech at the Catholic Prayer Breakfast, took care not to criticize the Pope,” Magister writes. Then Magister turns to…

8) Ukraine. The war in Ukraine, now more than three years old.

This is the central point in Magister’s essay.

Magister is a profound defender of the right of Ukraine to exist and to be independent, as a country.

And Magister sees something to criticize both in what Trump and Vance have done with regard to Ukraine, but also in what Francis has done with regard to Ukraine.

Magister writes:

“More than the divergences, in fact, Trump and the Catholics around him care about the convergences with Francis’s politics.

“Which concern Ukraine above all: with the pope’s repeated accusations against NATO of having ‘barked’ for years at Russia’s borders, provoking its reaction of self-defense; with his injunction to Ukraine itself to ‘raise the white flag’ and surrender; with a general affinity for the political and religious ‘Russian world,’ encouraged by the parallel diplomacy of the Community of Sant’Egidio, much dearer to the pope than the Secretariat of State.

“The fact is that the brutal public humiliation inflicted by Trump and Vance on Zelensky on February 28 did not raise from the Vatican authorities – albeit amid the forced silence of the gravely ill Pope – the slightest word not so much of protest, but at least of balance and correction.”

So Magister is saying there is an evident convergence of the US government with the policy and person of Pope Francis, and that this convergence pre-eminently concerns… Ukraine. And Russia…

9) Magister writes several more paragraphs, defending the right of Ukraine to be a country, and to have this recognized in whatever peace agreement is reached.

There is much left out of this analysis, and there will be space in future letters to speak of what Magister downplays.

But it remains true that Magister’s essay provides insight into the minds of many Europeans as three of the world’s “great powers” — Russia, America and the Holy See — seem to be moving toward a consensus on how to come to a peace agreement in Ukraine which many in Ukraine will not be willing to accept.

JD Vance — The First Truly Catholic American Statesman?

The Washington Post’s Peter Jamison on March 13 interviewed Chad Pecknold, Ph.D., professor of theology at Catholic University of America and fellow contributor – with Patrick Deneen – to the Substack blog The Postliberal Order, on Vice President JD Vance as a “Catholic in the White House.”

Peter Jamison: Generally, what are your thoughts on Vice President Vance’s public profile so far as a Catholic in the White House, and his Christian witness as a prominent, national elected official?

Chad Pecknold: I am very biased, but it strikes me as obvious and reasonable to state that we have never had a more compelling Catholic statesman in the White House. We will be comparing J.D. Vance to John F. Kennedy for many years, not only for their similarities but also for their deep differences as Catholic statesmen. They share, of course, manly vigor and rhetorical power. But where JFK held his faith in abeyance, with Catholic principles subordinated to the rules of liberal order, JDV takes a much more traditional approach which understands that the duties of a Christian statesman are duties which require Catholic principles to inform good governance, and not to be separated from it.

[…]He has stated very clearly that religious liberty is not just about legal safeguards, but it’s about supporting and encouraging faith in God. And he’s not been shy about expressing that faith in a way which actually illuminates government policies such as we have seen in his appeal to the ordo amoris for explaining immigration policy.

Jamison: What is your take on the dispute that erupted among Catholic thinkers over his interpretation of the ordo amoris?

Pecknold: The dispute which erupted was not really about the ordo amoris — it was about the compatibility between Christianity and Liberalism. To explain this, though, I need to explain why Vance’s correct appeal to ordo amoris triggered this deeper conflict.

The classical tradition frames questions of order very differently than liberal traditions. Instead of a focus on identity and individual rights, the ancients focused on duty and virtue because they saw personal alignment with these things as the key to happiness.

Much like Vance, Aristotle will argue in the Nicomachean Ethics that we have obligations first to our parents and siblings, then to friends who share common virtues, then to our fellow citizens, and only to strangers when it doesn’t undermine these prior obligations. These are all keyed to virtues like piety, patriotism, and magnanimity. Cicero’s On Duties is also very typical in that he conceives of governance also in terms of personal alignment with what is good for one’s family or city before all others.

[…]

Augustine recognizes that the classical understanding of these concentric circles of obligation really follow the hierarchy of being and goodness which has been caused by God who created and ordered the world, made it good and intelligible, and so also made it lovable.

Since God is Charity Itself, which orders and unites every good thing, it is God whom we are to love in all things. The ordo amoris is nothing other that relating the hierarchical order of reality itself to God who is Love Itself.

St. Thomas Aquinas unites these classical and Christian discussions in his famous treatise on “the order of charity.”

He argues that God is the supreme good and the principle of happiness, and so the happiness we get from loving ourselves, our family, our friends, and strangers is nothing other than a share of God’s goodness.

There’s a general sense in which we are to love all equally out of charity, but because we’re embodied creatures, it’s impossible to love all equally through our actions. Aquinas says that our love of neighbor thus “increases in proportion to the nearness” of those principles we hold in common with our actual neighbor.

So it is entirely reasonable that we love our families and fellow citizens more than we love strangers.

This doesn’t mean that one would not show charity to foreigners, but it’s notable that Aquinas thinks that while the refugee should be provided safe passage, they should be carefully tested for shared principles over time if they want to enter into “civic friendship,” and become fellow citizens.

Now here is the key to the conflict: neither the classical nor the Christian account of the ordo amoris fits with liberalism, which gives primacy to individual rights, not to common virtues.

Liberalism gives primacy to idealistic abstractions over concrete obligations to those with whom we already share principles.

At its heart, then, ordo amoris signals an opposition between the classical and Christian values that built Western civilization, and the political liberalism which has slowly eroded it.