Only three Catholics have won the presidency or vice presidency. For the first two, Democrats John F. Kennedy and Joe Biden, faith was a muted note in their public lives — a source of pride to millions of American Catholics but rarely invoked as a direct influence on policy.
The third, Vice President JD Vance, a Republican, has launched his current career as the nation’s most prominent elected Catholic in a very different way. In less than three months, Vance has made a string of unusual forays into the fraught borderland between religion and politics, castigating the hierarchy of his own church and defending President Donald Trump’s “America First” nationalism through appeals to ancient Christian texts.
