Vice President JD Vance was accused of choosing “MAGA over Jesus” in a damning opinion piece published by the National Catholic Reporter this week.
In the piece, the Catholic newspaper’s digital editor, John Grosso, rebuked Vance’s inflammatory and politicizing response to the killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis over the weekend.
Vance, said Grosso, had “the opportunity to call for peace and unity — to lower the temperature of the situation and express empathy with those suffering and mourning” and “could have chosen to share the Gospel message of healing and human dignity” but “instead, he chose to offer the MAGA message of division and blame.”
The comments of Vance, a Catholic convert, are “a moral stain on our collective witness of Catholicism,” said Grosso. But “they are no longer surprising,” he argued. “Given its scandal, the vice president’s cafeteria Catholicism must continue to be repudiated by people of faith.”
Grosso published a similar blistering commentary about Vance following the vice president’s justification of the fatal shooting of mother Renee Good, also at the hands of a federal agent in Minneapolis, earlier this month.
“As a Catholic, Vance knows better than to peddle this brand of gaslighting and agitation,” Grosso wrote in that piece, in which he also condemned Vance’s “twisted and wrongheaded view of Christianity” and suggested his “Catholicism seems to be little more than a political prop, a tool only for his career ambitions and desire for power.”
