US vice-president JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance at Mass in the Vatican last Easter. Photograph: Kenny Holston/The New York Times
How should world leaders deal with the Trump administration? Most presidents and prime ministers are opting for flattery and servility. But the head of the Catholic Church is different.
Pope Leo XIV’s first Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexi te, published last month, could not be less Maga-like. Emphasising the duty of Christians to serve the poor, it condemns “ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation”.
This is awkward for JD Vance, who previously clashed with the pope, when he was mere Cardinal Robert Prevost, over their very different understandings of Jesus’s teaching. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019 – a few years before he converted to Trump (having previously likened him to “America’s Hitler”).
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