Pope Francis, who died at 88 on Monday, used his last days on the planet to order up a stern dressing down to JD Vance on the White House’s attitude to migrants.
It was an entirely fitting final set piece from one of the few world leaders who had the courage—and political immunity—to stand up to and criticize, often in blistering terms, both presidencies of Donald Trump, explicitly calling his migration policies a “disgrace” and “not Christian.”
Vance traveled to the Vatican to meet with Francis on Sunday where he was given Easter eggs for his children, having previously met Francis’ number 2, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and the foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, in the Apostolic Palace on Saturday.
The Holy See said after that meeting there had been “an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners.”
It called for “serene collaboration” between the White House and the Catholic Church in the United States.
A statement from Vance’s office notably did not include migration among the topics of conversation, saying the two discussed Trump’s “commitment to restoring world peace,” Bloomberg reported.
That Francis dared to stand up to Donald Trump and his minions to the very end will surely cement his legacy as the anti-MAGA pope.
In February 2025, Francis responded to Trump’s plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants on Italian talk show Che Tempo Che Fa, saying: “If true, this will be a disgrace… This is not the way to solve things.”
It was also not his first run-in with Vance, the highest-ranking Catholic in the U.S. government, who converted to the faith in 2019.
In a February letter, Francis criticized Vance saying, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extends to other persons and groups.”
Vance acknowledged the Pope’s criticism, calling himself a “baby Catholic” and admitting that there are “things about the faith that I don’t know.”
Undoubtedly some of the papal animus towards Trump’s immigration policies sprang from his status as the first Latin American pope, and Trump’s relentless denigration of the continent; Francis was born Jose Mario Bergoglio, in 1936, in Argentina.
Trump and Francis clashed during Trump’s first presidency, when Francis described the proposal to build a southern border wall as “not Christian.” Trump retaliated, calling Francis “disgraceful” and a “very political person.” It didn’t stop Trump making a 2017 visit to the Vatican and calling it the “honor of a lifetime.”
Few would have predicted that Francis would have ended up preaching fire and brimstone against the president of the United States when he was elected in a fractious 2013 conclave. Francis was essentially a compromise candidate whose main asset was his low profile, his love of consensus and his reputation for humility.
He took on the leadership of the Catholic Church from Benedict XVI, whose inept handling of the Catholic child-abuse scandals led him to become the first pope to resign in more than 600 years.
Pope Francis inherited a holy mess: Benedict’s disastrous papacy had left the Catholic church at war with itself, bitterly divided between traditionalists who had applauded Benedict’s scholarly, rigid interpretation of Catholic doctrine, and liberals and progressives within the Church who felt at best marginalized and at worst absolutely abandoned by it—as did millions of traumatized Catholics and their families worldwide who had been affected, either directly or indirectly, by clerical abuse.
