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PRESS RELEASE – CATHOLIC ACTION LEAGUE OF BOSTON
Former President Donald J. Trump has selected U.S. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his vice-presidential running mate. Vance is a 2019 convert to the Catholic Faith.
A Republican National Convention vote nominating Vance will be a formality.
Vance will be the eighth Catholic in American history to receive a major party nomination for Vice-President.
Previous Catholic nominees were Republican Congressman William Miller in 1964; Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie in 1968; Democratic Senator Thomas Eagleton, who was nominated but withdrew and was replaced by former Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver in 1972; Democratic Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro in 1984; Democratic Senator Joe Biden in 2008; and Republican Congressman Paul Ryan in 2012.
The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts is describing Vance as “an elected official who is firmly in the mainstream of American Catholic politics, that is to say, one who is privately Catholic, but in his public positions, has conformed to the dominant secular culture.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle made the following comment: “When Vance first ran for public office in 2022, as a U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio, he was a supporter of the right to life.
‘I am pro-life. I’ve always been pro-life,’ Vance said during a 2022 campaign debate.
As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2022, he hailed the Dobbs decision as ‘an amazing victory,’ and endorsed federal action on abortion, saying ‘some minimum national standard is totally fine with me.‘
Vance previously supported the Texas abortion ban—which allowed only a life of the mother exception—and condemned rape and incest exceptions, saying ‘two wrongs don’t make a right.’
Once he was in contention for the vice-presidency however, Vance suddenly decided that his professed pro-life principles were expendable.
Now, echoing President Trump, Vance says abortion is a state issue, supports rape and incest exceptions, and defends the 2024 Supreme Court ruling in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which upheld the legal availability of the abortion drug mifepristone, which Vance now calls a ‘medication.’
‘…the Supreme Court made a decision that the American people should have access to that medication. Donald Trump has supported that opinion. I support that opinion,’ Vance said.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, Mifepristone killed 642,700 innocent children in 2023. It is now the most common form of abortion in America, accounting for 63% of U.S. abortions.
As Donald Trump distances himself and the Republican Party from the pro-life positions of his previous administration, one would have hoped that pro-life Catholics in Congress would demonstrate some resistance to this defection. Instead, Catholic senators like J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio have been trimming their sails to gain a place on the ticket with President Trump.
Vance, it would seem, has received his reward.
Faithful Catholics exhort Christians in politics to take as their model and example Saint Thomas More, who sacrificed his life rather than betray his conscience.
As J.D. Vance’s shameless betrayal demonstrates, America’s Catholic political class already has a model to emulate. That would be Vidkun Quisling.”
