JD Vance, once an ‘angry atheist’, is America’s most powerful Catholic. How will he wield his faith?

In his new memoir, the vice-president covers his conversion and politics – at a time when hardline Catholicism is ascendant in the US When JD Vance became Roman Catholic, he wondered what his dead grandmother would think. His grandmother Mamaw did not have anything against them, but growing up in Ohio he had sometimes heard that Catholics were servants of the antichrist. And although the people he knew as a child professed personal relationships with Jesus, most rarely went to church. The Church of Rome – with its rituals and costumes, foreign leadership, veneration of Mary and the saints – seemed exotic, even alien, to his family from Appalachia. Yet he has said he was consoled, on the day in 2019 that he was received into Catholicism, by a sudden sense that his grandmother was urging him on from the grave. He heard one of her favorite phrases in his ear: “Time to shit or get off the pot.” So, about five years before he was elected the vice-president of the United States with a running mate, Donald Trump, whom he once described as unworthy of Christians’ support, Vance had his baptism and first communion in a small ceremony conducted by the Dominican friars who first e