Vatican reports exchange of views with Vance about migration

Akayla Gardner and Donato Paolo Mancini, Bloomberg News on Apr 19, 2025

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JD Vance met with the Vatican’s second highest-ranking official during his visit to Rome, a meeting that took the U.S. vice president to the governing body of his own faith amid tension with the U.S. over immigration policy.

The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher spoke privately with Vance on Saturday, talks described as “cordial” by the Holy See. In a statement, the Vatican said there’d been an “exchange of opinions” over global humanitarian issues, “with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners.”

A statement issued by Vance’s office made no mention of talks about migration. The men discussed their shared religious faith, Catholicism in the U.S., “the plight of persecuted Christian communities around the world,” and Trump’s “commitment to restoring world peace,” according to the statement.

Pope Francis, who leads the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, has criticized Trump on immigration, including an effort to deport millions of migrants, which the pontiff said will “end badly.” Vance also drew a rebuke from the pope after offering an interpretation of Catholic teachings to support the administration’s crackdown on immigration.

Vance, a Catholic convert who was baptized in 2019, responded to Francis’ rebuke in February with praise for the pope, and called himself a “baby Catholic.” Still, he said he would defend his views on immigration.

“Hope was expressed for serene collaboration between the State and the Catholic Church in the United States, whose valuable service to the most vulnerable people was acknowledged,” the Vatican’s statement continued.

Francis, 88, was discharged from a five-week hospital stay last month after battling a life-threatening series of infections, including pneumonia. Though he’s appeared in public since, and made a surprise appearance at Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City on Saturday afternoon, his public engagements have been drastically curtailed.

The vice president’s office said a report that Vance and the pope met briefly was false.

The Vatican and the Republic of Italy are independent states, though the former wields considerable influence over policy in Rome. Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, who met with Vance earlier in his trip after visiting Trump in Washington on Thursday, is close to the Holy See. She even invited Francis to speak at last year’s Group of Seven summit in southern Italy, the first time a pope had ever attended such a meeting.

The last time a pope met with a U.S. vice president was 2020, when Francis met with Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence.