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13 things to know about J.D. Vance’s Catholic journey
By
Matt McDonald
National Catholic Register, Jul 21, 2024 / 07:00 am
Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance is one of the most overtly religious major politicians in America.
Vance has written extensively about his life in faith, both in a mega-selling memoir and in a long essay that describes how a drug-using teenager with anger problems, family problems, school problems, and doubts about God became an accomplished, successful family man excited about being a Catholic.
Vance, who comes from a long line of culturally Protestant Scots-Irish Americans from Appalachia, was baptized Catholic in August 2019.
Below are 13 items about his meandering journey to Rome and the aftermath, drawn largely from his 3-million-copy-selling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” and a 6,777-word
essay he wrote about his conversion for the Easter 2020 issue of The Lamp, a Catholic magazine.
9. Vance’s family ties kept him from becoming a Catholic for a long time.
Vance connected with Catholic doctrine several years after his grandmother died in 2005. It made sense to him.
“Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I converted I would no longer be my grandmother’s grandson,” Vance wrote in The Lamp.
That left him in a sort of limbo.
“So for many years I occupied the uncomfortable territory between curiosity about Catholicism and mistrust,” he wrote.
10. Vance credits his Hindu wife with helping him convert to Catholicism.
Vance acknowledges having problems with anger stemming from his chaotic childhood and the destructive behavior of people in his family, especially his mother, who abused prescription drugs and went through a string of boyfriends and husbands.
That anger affected his relationship with Usha, his girlfriend in law school, but she helped him work through it to try to become the kind of husband and father he wanted to be. They married in 2014.
“The sad fact is that I couldn’t do it without Usha. Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion — I can be defused, but only with skill and precision,” Vance wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Usha is the daughter of immigrants from India and a Hindu. Vance felt hesitant about joining the Catholic Church because he wasn’t a Catholic when they got married.
“But from the beginning, she supported my decision, so I can’t blame the delay on her,” Vance wrote in his conversion essay.
Vance has said the Church’s clergy sex-abuse scandal delayed his conversion by a few months.
11. Dominican priests helped draw Vance to Catholicism.
13 things to know about J.D. Vance’s Catholic journey
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