Politics before faith: JD Vance follows Kennedy and Cuomo

In 1960, then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy set a standard for Catholic politicians seeking federal office in a nation still viscerally anti-Catholic. In a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts declared that he separates church from state in his soul. He was not ambiguous about which had priority.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute…. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair…. I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters—and the church does not speak for me.

In 1984, when abortion, after over a decade of political vacillation, had hardened as a good to Democrats and an evil to Republicans, Catholic Democrats were seeking some justification for choosing their party over their faith in an election year that featured Catholic and abortion-supporting Geraldine Ferraro as vice-presidential candidate under Walter Mondale. New York Governor Mario Cuomo stepped forward to present a solution.

In a speech delivered at the University of Notre Dame entitled “Religious Belief and Public Morality: A Catholic Governor’s Perspective,” Cuomo gave the impression of a conscience wrestling with the abortion issue that his Church opposed but his party supported. In fact, Cuomo developed the Kennedy Doctrine to cover support for immorality in what became known as the “Personally Opposed, But” argument. The “Personally Opposed” half insincerely genuflects to Catholicism by acknowledging its teaching against abortion and the holders’ claimed abhorrence of it. The “But” half trumps the former by claiming that the politician cannot impose his personal religious beliefs on Americans, so the politician can support abortion in office.

Cuomo did not use the phrase “Personally Opposed”; he chose to equivocate with a series of rhetorical questions:

I accept the Church’s teaching on abortion. Must I insist you do? By law? By denying you Medicaid funding? By a constitutional amendment? If so, which one? Would that be the best way to avoid abortions or to prevent them? …

Certainly, we should not be forced to mold Catholic morality to conform to disagreement by non-Catholics however sincere or severe their disagreement. Our bishops should be teachers not pollsters. They should not change what we Catholics believe in order to ease our consciences or please our friends or protect the Church from criticism.

But if the breadth, intensity and sincerity of opposition to church teaching shouldn’t be allowed to shape our Catholic morality, it can’t help but determine our ability—our realistic, political ability—to translate our Catholic morality into civil law, a law not for the believers who don’t need it but for the disbelievers who reject it.

Cuomo’s tactic guided Catholic Democrats’ appropriation of abortion until the late 2000s, when the Democratic Party shed any doubts about abortion’s goodness: no longer relegated to “safe, legal, and rare,” Democrats exalted abortion as the holy cornerstone of “women’s reproductive rights.” Politicians of Cuomo’s era—Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi chief among them—would carry on pretending they could reconcile their religion with their support for abortion.

But Catholic Democrats of the generation after them quit bothering their consciences: they have accepted abortion without hesitation, as it is a requirement for seeking a nomination as a Democrat, and, at least publicly, they have paid no mind to religion.

When Roe v. Wade fell, Republicans were forced to craft a new approach to abortion as a political issue. They needed specific plans of opposition, and, to date, no one has come forward with a workable vision. With abortion consistently winning protection on state ballot referenda since 2022, some Republicans are now seeing abortion opposition as a political liability. Since Republicans today attend religious services more regularly than Democrats, the situation has flipped: forty years after Cuomo sought to cover for Catholic Democrats’ embrace of abortion, now some Catholic Republicans are imitating their yesteryear rivals.

Now, in 2024, the Republican senator and Catholic convert JD Vance has been nominated as the GOP vice-presidential candidate under Donald Trump, who has declared abortion to be strictly an issue for states. Vance, who, as his political enemies are fond to point out, declared during his 2022 senate run that he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” now is following Trump in disavowing any federal ban on abortion. “We want the federal government to focus on these big economic and immigration questions,” Vance argued. “Let the states figure out their own abortion policy.”

A politician can oppose abortion in multiple ways, and choosing the states-only route is not necessarily an abdication of the pro-life cause—though it is not without its problems, as will be noted below. This position falls short of the federal limits that most pro-lifers desire, but it is certainly a far cry from Mario Cuomo’s “Personally Opposed, But” approach that is really an affirmation of legal abortion.

Yet, in an August 14 interview with the NY Post, Vance’s self-justification for dithering on abortion and for supporting IVF echoed that of Cuomo. In fairness to Vance, the transcript of the interview is not available. Headlines can be misleading, as was the case with this Vance interview on the topic, and quotations can be manipulated in a news article to change the speaker’s tenor. That said, Vance’s printed responses are problematic.

Shortly after his conversion in 2019, Vance told Rod Dreher that “[m]y views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching. That was one of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church. I saw a real overlap between what I would like to see and what the Catholic Church would like to see.”

To the NY Post, Vance distanced himself—and America—from the same Catholic social teaching with which he once aligned:

Catholic social teaching is obviously very robust. I think that no person who, or at least no one I know who’s Catholic, doesn’t accept that just because the Catholic Church teaches something, doesn’t mean you necessarily as a legislator need to affect that to public policy….

I think it certainly influences how you think about issues, it certainly influences how I think about issues. But I think that there are a lot of things the Catholic Church teaches that frankly, Americans would just never go for.

As a student of Catholic social teaching (CST), Vance should know well that CST is not a political program, but a set of principles hierarchically ordered to guide politicians and citizens to foster human dignity within a commonwealth. Some principles are more important than others, and they intentionally leave room for political leaders to apply them in their particular circumstances.

In lumping all CST into the pejorative “just because the Catholic Church teaches something” box, he is not only seeking cover for his actions that do not conform to CST. He is borrowing from Mario Cuomo’s speech and rationale. Witness:

As a Catholic, I respect the teaching authority of the bishops. But must I agree with everything in the bishops’ pastoral letter on peace and fight to include it in party platforms? And will I have to do the same for the forthcoming pastoral on economics even if I am an unrepentant supply sider? Must I, having heard the Pope renew the Church’s ban on birth control devices, veto the funding of contraceptive programs for non-Catholics or dissenting Catholics in my State?

As noted in the Post interview, in February Vance threw his support behind a potential bill supporting IVF on the federal level, the first legislation of its kind, despite the Church’s opposition to the practice. He defended himself by appealing to America’s religious pluralism:

You have to accept that you live in a Democratic society where you have to give people a full voice in the society. You have to give people their ability to have their own moral views reflected in public policy. There are a lot of non-Catholics in America and I accept that.

Forty years earlier, Cuomo made this same defense:

[W]e are also a people of many religions, with no established church, who hold different beliefs on many matters. Our public morality, then—the moral standards we maintain for everyone, not just the ones we insist on in our private lives—depends on a consensus view of right and wrong. The values derived from religious belief will not—and should not—be accepted as part of the public morality unless they are shared by the pluralistic community at large, by consensus.

In advocating for immorality in the form of IVF—which is a major step beyond acquiescing to—Vance has placed himself in Cuomo’s camp and at odds with the Church’s teaching on the role of Catholics in political life.

The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 2002 Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life reiterates that “those who are directly involved in lawmaking bodies have a grave and clear obligation to oppose any law that attacks human life. For them, as for every Catholic, it is impossible to promote such laws or to vote for them.”

The states-only approach to abortion limits can also land Vance in a moral quandary. When asked, Vance told NBC’s Meet the Press that a future president Trump would veto any federal bills limiting abortion. The president, not the vice-president, would be morally responsible for such a decision. But should a Catholic vice-president not even make the effort to convince the president to sign such a bill, then he would not only transgress his duties as a Catholic politician, but he would also violate the first principle of natural law: do good and avoid evil.

Finally, states-only approach aside, Vance’s clear support of legal access to the abortion pill mifepristone is deeply problematic. To support mifepristone is to support abortion. Can we say, then, that Vance, since he signed on as Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, is “personally opposed to abortion, but…”?

This is not a matter of the Trump-Vance ticket as a “more moral” option than Harris-Walz. This concerns the integrity of a Catholic politician seeking federal office, and whether he is willing to govern according to Catholic moral teaching—which is nothing other than the natural moral law accessible by reason for all people regardless of religion.

Ironically, Mario Cuomo articulated how this can be done before rejecting it in favor of moral compromise:

I can, if so inclined, demand some kind of law against abortion not because my Bishops say it is wrong but because I think that the whole community, regardless of its religious beliefs, should agree on the importance of protecting life—including life in the womb, which is at the very least potentially human and should not be extinguished casually.

Since his nomination as vice-president, Vance has yet to make an attempt to defend human life and oppose abortion in this manner.

Will Senator Vance address, in writing and at length, his understanding of the role of the Catholic politician on the undercard of a presidential candidate who, in order to win votes, is openly supporting immoral practices that Catholics oppose?

Because, right now, Vance sounds an awful lot like the Catholic Democrats of old—compromising his faith for the sake of political gain.

Catholic World Report