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Vance's Attack on the Pope Leaves Bruises -- On The Vice President

SAN DIEGO -- As a refugee from the Catholic Church, I confess to not knowing the Bible as well as I should.

But I don't remember the part where the lost sheep rises up and bites the shepherd.

Vice President JD Vance, who has been Catholic for about 10 minutes, said recently that it is "very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology."

I'm making the sign of the cross. Vance is the one who ought to be careful. A lightning strike might be around the corner.

Vance took offense when Pope Leo XIV -- who has criticized the war in the Persian Gulf -- insisted that Jesus is "never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs."

At a Turning Point USA event in Georgia, Vance fired back. He insisted that God was the side of "the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis ... who liberated Holocaust camps."

Apparently, the vice president -- who doesn't have a firm grasp on either the law or theology -- also don't know much about history.

Those Americans who "liberated Holocaust camps" entered World War II only after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. If God was really calling the shots back then, as Vance suggested -- instead of squeamish U.S. politicians, including former President Franklin D. Roosevelt -- the United States would have battled the Nazis earlier and saved more lives.

Then there is the audacity. Even for a white male who had the benefit of being raised in a country where those characteristics are treated like the golden ticket, it takes a lot of arrogance mixed with audacity and entitlement to lecture the Pope on theology.

Let's not forget that Pope Leo XIV -- the first U.S.-born pontiff -- was born and raised on the Southside of Chicago. He is no pushover. He obviously has no qualms fighting two bullies at once.

This week, speaking in Cameroon, Leo turned up his criticism of leaders who use religion to justify war. The world is "being ravaged by a handful of tyrants", he said.

Meanwhile, Vance needs to learn one cannot serve two masters.

On the one hand, the 41-year-old credits Catholicism -- to which he converted late in life, just seven years ago in 2019 -- with giving him a sense of purpose that was missing all those years before when he was an evangelical Christian and later an atheist.

In fact, in June, Vance -- whose memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy," sold more than a million copies -- has a new book coming out. "Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith" tells the story of how Vance found his way to Catholicism after, as he writes, "the Christian faith of my youth failed to properly take root."

But, on the other hand, Vance's day job is serving as an apprentice to President Donald Trump. That master is a narcissist, a con man and a rhetorical bomb thrower.

And, at the moment, the lesson that Trump seems to be teaching his protege is how to become more intensely unlikable to more people.

This is not to say that Trump magically transformed Vance into what my late friend Al Simpson -- the former Republican U.S. senator from Wyoming -- called "the south end of a horse facing north."

I'm willing to believe that -- as a Marine, Yale Law student, and venture capitalist -- the native of Middletown, Ohio, always rubbed some people the wrong way.

Recently, when Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf -- Iran's parliamentary speaker -- accused Israel and the United States of violating the ceasefire in the Persian Gulf, Vane responded by saying: "I actually wonder how good he is at understanding English."

My own theory is that much of Vance's abrasiveness comes from a deep rage over a screwed-up childhood. The story he tells in his memoir is not happy reading. Vance was dealt a bad hand. Saddled with a working-class upbringing, his earliest memories are of a broken home, a dysfunctional family and a drug-addicted mother who went to jail and left her son to be raised by his grandmother.

Vance turned his life around. Good for him. Yet it's not so easy to get over the trauma of having a family torn apart and being abandoned by a parent who gets ensnared in the criminal justice system.

It's likely the vice president always had issues. But with Trump as his mentor, Vance went from being someone who was "not likable" to someone who is not credible, tolerable, or deserving of respect.

His dustup with Pope Leo XIV illustrates that. It's nothing to be proud of, not for him and not for the rest of us.

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To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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