What to Know
Vice President JD Vance has joined President Donald Trump in his escalating public dispute with Pope Leo XIV, telling the leader of the Catholic Church to stay out of American political affairs.
The friction intensified after the pontiff criticized the White House regarding the direction of the Iran war, prompting Vance to suggest during a Monday night interview on Fox News that the Vatican should limit its focus to religious and moral concerns.
“It would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what’s going on in the Catholic church and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy,” Vance said on “Special Report with Bret Baier.”
The dispute began shortly after Pope Leo suggested during prayers at Saint Peter’s Basilica that a “delusion of omnipotence” surrounds the conflict with Iran, according to NPR. On Sunday, the pressure grew when American cardinals appeared on “60 Minutes” to criticize the administration’s stance on mass deportations and the war in Iran.
Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, attempted to brush off the spat as not “particularly newsworthy.”
“We certainly have a good relationship with the Vatican but we’re also going to disagree on substantive questions from time to time,” Vance said. “I think that’s a totally reasonable thing. I don’t think it’s particularly newsworthy.”
The vice president also defended a now-deleted social media post of Trump which depicted him as a Jesus-like figure in red and white robes healing the sick.
On Monday during an unscheduled news conference at the White House, Trump said that he thought it was an image of him as a “doctor.”
“Well, it wasn’t a picture, it was me. I did post it, and I thought it was me as the doctor and it had to do with Red Cross as a Red Cross worker there, which we support,” Trump said in a video posted by ABC7NY.
Vance said in his Fox News interview that the president took the image down because the incident was a misunderstood attempt at humor.
“The president was posting a joke, and of course he took it down because he recognized that a lot of people weren’t understanding his humor,” Vance told Baier. “[He] likes to mix it up on social media. One of the good things about this president is that he’s not filtered. He doesn’t send everything through a communications professional. He actually reaches out directly to the people.”
The backlash from within Trump’s own base has been significant following the AI post. Conservative pundit Megan Basham called the imagery “outrageous blasphemy,” while Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene characterized the post on X as reflecting an “Antichrist spirit.”
Beneath the exchange of social media posts, deeper diplomatic tensions remain.
A report from The Free Press suggest that senior Pentagon officials, including Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, may have pressured the Vatican’s ambassador, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, to support U.S. military strategies when meeting in January.
Vatican officials described the meeting to The Free Press as “a bitter lecture warning that the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants — and that the Church had better take its side.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Defense pointed MassLive to an X post it made on April 9, which called the Free Press’ characterization of the meeting “highly exaggerated and distorted.”
“The meeting between Pentagon and Vatican officials was a respectful and reasonable discussion,” the post reads. “We have nothing but the highest regard and welcome continued dialogue with the Holy See.”
The U.S. Holy See shared the department’s statement on X, stating that “The Cardinal emphatically denied the media’s portrayal of his meeting with Colby.”
“Deliberate misrepresentation of these routine meetings sow unfounded division and misunderstanding,” the Holy See wrote. “Our relationship remains strong and productive.”
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Liesel Nygard; masslive.com; (TNS) || ©2026 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit masslive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
