Trump’s VP pick is a New York Times best-selling author, the subject of a major film, and an Ohio Senator. But what about his faith? Vance, an adult convert to Catholicism and married to a Hindu woman, has a complicated relationship with religion and, after his recent support for keeping mifepristone, an abortion pill, legal, with the Republican’s religious base. Here are five faith facts about Vance: Vance is an adult convert to Catholicism. Vance converted to Catholicism in August of 2019, when he was baptized and confirmed at St. Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati, Ohio, by the Rev. Henry Stephan, a Dominican friar. Vance said he’d converted because he “became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true and that the people who had the most influence over him were themselves Catholic. Vance is tied to an ideology known as “Catholic Integralism,” an intellectual movement that, experts say, prefers a “soft power” approach to exerting Christian influence over society. Thinkers in the movement herald the importance of a Christian “strategic adviser” to people in power.
Vance’s wife, Usha, is not Christian and was raised in a Hindu household. According to a recent interview with Fox and Friends, Usha Chilukuri Vance, Usha met her husband in Yale Law School and married shortly after graduation. Usha, a native Californian, was raised by Indian immigrants in a Hindu household but has said she was very supportive of Vance’s conversion to Catholicism. Vance thinks Christianity is an ‘answer’ to existential questions about American identity. During a 2023 interview, Vance brought up Christian nationalism, which he dismissed as a term “meant to be very scary.” But he went on to explain how he envisions Christianity informing American life — and, particularly, American identity. “We’re a country that is majority Christian, nominally, but not nearly majority Christian in terms of practice,” he said. “We’re a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy that’s heavily exposed to the economic forces of globalization, and I think that we have not yet figured out how to harmonize that with some basic sense of what it means to be an American in the 21st century.”
I happen to think that the Christian faith is a good way of helping provide an answer to that question.” Vance said His statements about abortion and immigration may trigger blowback from some Catholics. On July 7, Vance told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he supported mifepristone “being accessible.” Mifepristone is used alongside misoprostol in abortions before 10 weeks of pregnancy. In a campaign fundraising message on July 8, Vance called for mass deportations of immigrants without legal status, a promise also present in the Republican Party platform. “We need to deport every single person who invaded our country illegally.” The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has called for a pathway to legal status and citizenship for the approximately 11 million immigrants who live in the U.S. without legal authorization, emphasizing the obligation in the Catholic Catechism to “welcome the foreigner.”
Source: Religion News Service
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