Are Catholic Converts Generally Encouraged to Call the Pope a Liar?

If there’s one thing I’ve always sort of admired about our President, it’s Donald Trump’s seemingly preternatural ability to pick exactly the correct moment to make things as monumentally awkward as they possibly can be for his underlings. The man is a master of this dynamic: He lurks in the shadows until precisely when his comment would be most damaging or embarrassing to those in his closest circle, waiting for some ancient corner of his lizard brain to calculate that the time has come to make the lives of those around him a bit worse. How else to explain Trump choosing to pick a fight with the pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, and post images of himself as Christ, less than two weeks after Vice President JD Vance announces his second memoir and Hillbilly Elegy follow-up, which is a book entirely based on his 2019 conversion to the Catholic church? It’s as if Trump drew up the plans specifically to cause Vance as much awkward tension as possible, and who knows–Trump is clearly petty enough to do exactly that. We are, after all, talking about a man whose first Vice President was almost hanged by a Jan. 6 lynch mob.

For Vance, though, the gauntlet Trump threw down in deriding the first American Pope, in which the President essentially referred to him as a DEI pontiff and hilariously called the Pope “weak on crime” as if Popes are typically masked vigilantes brutalizing street toughs, served as an obvious launch pad for media grilling: Do you, Mr. Vice President, agree with Trump, or with the leader of your faith? And of course, it didn’t take long for JD Vance to come out on the side you knew he would inevitably have to take. Forced to choose between his oh-so-precious faith and Catholic dogma, or fellating his political patron, Vance made the only choice available to him. He proceeded to throw the Pope under the bus, and called the Holy Father a liar.

That said, he of course couldn’t actually use words like “lies” or “liar.” His task was to find a way to agree with Trump while using the most cowardly and passive language possible to attack Leo, and I think we can all agree he succeeded in stunning fashion when he told a sparse Turning Point USA crowd in Georgia yesterday that if Leo was “going to opine on matters of theology,” (how dare a Pope do that) then his comments needed to be “anchored in the truth.” Which is to say, Vance is undeniably saying that currently the Pope’s comments are currently not “anchored in the truth,” which is a not-at-all sniveling way to say “lies.” He also instructed the Pope to be “careful” about the way he talks, saying “In the same way that it’s important for the vice president of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d almost say that sounds like a threat?

Dear Pope Leo,

If you excommunicate JD Vance, I will return to the church.

Lapsed Catholic,
Parker

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— Parker Molloy (@parkermolloy.com) Apr 14, 2026 at 9:32 PM

What had Vance in such a tizzy? Well, it probably had something to do with the Pope’s recent anti-war (!!!) statements, including the Pope posting on Friday that “God does not bless any conflict,” and that “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” In the course of his Turning Point USA appearance, Vance attempted to make a case/Popesplain the concept of “just war,” invoking World War II and questioning “Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis?” Never mind the fact that a frighteningly large chunk of President Trump’s own voter base now sides with those same Nazis over the American liberators, claiming that the “wrong side won” WWII.

Vice President JD Vance said on Tuesday that Pope Leo XIV was wrong to say that disciples of Christ are “never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs,” invoking World War II in the Trump administration’s spat with the Catholic Church. nyti.ms/4t8S9Bx

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— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) Apr 14, 2026 at 9:42 PM

Suffice to say, although the Pope himself may be above being dragged into a streetfight with political lowlifes–while Vance was speaking, Leo was busy spreading the gospel and planting an olive tree at the site of St. Augustine’s death in modern-day Algeria–other members of the U.S. Catholic clergy weren’t going to take those comments lying down. Vance was dressed-down on Wednesday by a handful of Catholic bishops in response, highlighting the MAGA movement’s potential fragility in hanging on to the support of as many as 70 million American Catholics. Other conservative commenters have naturally jumped into the same anti-Pope echo chamber, with the likes of Sean Hannity this week questioning whether the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church is familiar with the content of the Holy Bible. I dunno, Sean, I mean he’s only been a priest for 43 years. That’s not really a lot of time to be able to familiarize yourself with a text.

JD Vance is of course a poster child for the never-out-of-fashion embrace of Christianity (he’s a former atheist) by those looking to get ahead in conservative politics, further reflecting the popularity in particular of far right American men embracing the aesthetics (but not the substance) of the Catholic church in the last half decade. There’s even a term for the aesthetic itself: “Tradcath,” of course meaning “traditional Catholicism,” which rejects the now 60-year-old reforms of the Second Vatican Council in an effort to reshape the world via a comfortably paternalistic reset that ignores six decades the church has consciously spent growing more diverse and welcoming. In practice, Tradcaths tend to be more like crypto-Evangelical doomsday enthusiasts who enjoy fetishizing the aesthetic traditionalism and formality of the Roman Catholic Church, while ignoring how the church they claim to venerate has changed over the last century or so. They long to use the unimpeachable virtue signaling of religious awakening to turn back the clock socially, restoring “western” (i.e. “white”) ideals and traditional gender roles, among other things. Given that, perhaps it’s easy to see why the Tradcath lifestyle makes a natural crossover with the so-called Manosphere and its cultivation of “alpha male” and “tradwife” aesthetics.

i can't stop thinking about jd vance laysplaining st augustine to the pope

— sarah jeong (@sarahjeong.bsky.social) Apr 15, 2026 at 4:23 PM

Into that world barges an opportunistic Vice President JD Vance, who became a Catholic convert in 2019. His upcoming book is titled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, and is due out in June from HarperCollins. In a perfect summation of the lack of shits seemingly given by anyone involved, it reportedly features a Methodist church on its cover. What better visual metaphor could there be for a memoir on Catholicism, from a guy who thinks he knows more about the faith than the leader of that faith, who the very dogma that Tradcaths love assures us is in fact infallible in interpreting God’s word?

Fun fact: Communion, as it turns out, was also the title of noted UFOlogist Whitley Strieber’s best-selling 1987 “nonfiction” account of how he was repeatedly abducted by aliens. Who can say which of the two Communions will ultimately have a higher ratio of falsehoods? I think I can predict, however, which one the Pope would probably prefer.