Vice President JD Vance needed a quick reminder from the press on Wednesday after he seemed to forget the name of a senior Vatican official who reportedly faced hostility from U.S. military brass earlier this year.
“Who?!” asked Vance after a reporter named Cardinal Christophe Pierre, who served as the Holy See’s former ambassador to the U.S. from 2016 until March.
“With no disrespect to the cardinal, I don’t know who Cardinal Christophe Pierre is.”
The veep, who is Catholic, was asked about a recent report by The Free Press that outlined tensions between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV.
The Bari Weiss-founded outlet — citing unnamed Vatican sources— reported that Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for policy, called Pierre to a closed-door meeting in January where he flexed the U.S. military’s power to do “whatever it wants in the world,” before telling him that the Catholic Church “better take its side.”
Officials called the meeting in response to the pontiff taking aim at those who rule via “a diplomacy based on force” and a “zeal for war” in a speech earlier in January, per the Letters from Leo page on Substack.
The meeting reportedly alarmed some Vatican officials and led to the cancellation of plans for the American-born pope to visit the U.S. on July 4 for the country’s 250th anniversary celebration.
A spokesperson for the Pentagon has denied the reporting, describing the meeting as a “respectful and reasonable discussion.”
Vance, moments after the reporter named Pierre’s role as a diplomat, remarked, “Oh, OK, OK! I — I’ve met him before. Sorry, I just didn’t remember the name.”
He went on to claim he never saw The Free Press’ reporting on the meeting, adding that he wished to talk to the cardinal and officials in the administration to “figure out what actually happened.”
Vance’s apparent memory lapse arrives a little over a week after an eagle-eyed reporter at The Bulwark spotted a United Methodist church in Virginia on the Appalachia-esque cover of the vice president’s upcoming book “Communion.”
The book is set to detail Vance’s “personal journey” back to Catholicism, so the not-so-Catholic house of worship’s spot on the cover confused its congregants, who noted that the church has no connections to Vance nor his Christian denomination.
A spokesperson for HarperCollins told USA Today that the image was picked for the cover because it “comes from the part of the country where Vance grew up.”
(Note: Middletown, Ohio — where Vance was born and raised — is a nearly six-hour drive to the site of the church, per Google Maps. The city where he spent summers with relatives — Jackson, Kentucky — is also nearly four hours away by car.)
