Vance Tells Pope Leo to Avoid Political Fights With US

Vice President JD Vance is drawing a line between the Vatican and the White House. In a Fox News interview on Monday, the nation's highest-ranking Catholic said that Pope Leo XIV should largely steer clear of American politics, suggesting the pontiff "stick to matters of morality" and internal church affairs, while President Trump handles US policy, per the New York Times. Vance, a Catholic convert with a forthcoming book on his faith, downplayed widespread Christian criticism of Trump's recent social-media barrage against Leo, in which the president labeled the pope "weak on crime." The comments land amid deep tension between the Trump administration and Catholic leaders, who've condemned mass deportations and framed the US war with Iran as unjust and the US government's messaging around it as "dehumanizing."

Leo, an outspoken critic of the war, said Monday that he has "no fear of the Trump administration" and will keep speaking out. Vance called disagreements with the pope "totally reasonable" but emphasized that Catholics need only accept papal authority on church matters, not politics—echoing John F. Kennedy's 1960 pledge not to take policy instructions from Rome. Vance also defended Trump's since-deleted AI-generated image casting himself in a Jesus-like pose as "a joke" that many misunderstood. Trump, meanwhile, has said that he won't be apologizing to the pope, per the AP. "He went public," the president said of Leo. "I'm just responding."