Converts to Catholicism are clapping back after a priest made televised remarks dismissing JD Vance’s theological views because the vice president has been Catholic “only for six years.”

Responding to comments made by Passionist Father Edward Beck on CNN on Feb. 12, several Catholic converts, including academics, priests and journalists, took to social media to express their disdain for what they saw as a broader disparagement of those who enter the Church as adults.

“The tone he uses in talking of VP Vance as a convert (‘only six years!’) is the reveal here,” said Carl Olson, editor of Catholic World Report, on X (formerly Twitter). “The hatred of converts — which I’ve seen and experienced far too much of — is not only bizarre, it is anti-Catholic.”

Father Beck, a regular CNN contributor known for his liberal views, was speaking during a panel discussion about Vance’s comments about the ordo amoris, a theological concept developed by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. 

Vance had cited the concept, which proposes an ordered hierarchy of one’s loves, as a justification for the Trump administration’s “America First” immigration policies. The vice president’s Jan. 30 comment kicked off a still-brewing theological debate that even Pope Francis weighed in on in his Feb. 11 letter to the U.S. bishops.

Father Beck provided his own interpretation of Pope Francis’ characterization of the “true ordo amoris,” which emphasized universal love and has been widely seen as a rebuttal of the vice president’s use of the concept.

“The Pope says, ‘No Mr. Vance, you who are a Catholic only for six years. I’m a Catholic for 88 years as being pope,’” said Father Beck. “He’s a convert to Catholicism. That’s not what Augustine meant. Augustine meant the paradigm of the Good Samaritan.”

Convert Clapback

Converts and other Catholics took issue with the celebrity priest’s perceived dismissal of Vance’s views based on the vice president’s relative newness to Catholicism. 

Several commentors pointed out that the originator of the ordo amoris concept himself was only a recent convert by Father Beck’s standards at the time of some of his important contributions to the Church.

“St. Augustine became a priest ‘only 6 years’ after his conversion, and a bishop ‘only 8 years’ after, and immediately wrote his Confessions, which is a masterpiece of Christian civilization,” said Chad Pecknold, a theologian at The Catholic University of America, in an X post.

Father Dwight Longenecker, a convert and longtime Catholic priest of the Diocese of Charleston, South Carolina, playfully asked when it would be okay for him to speak publicly about Catholicism.

“I’ve been a Catholic for thirty years. When exactly am I allowed to express an opinion?” the popular blogger quipped on X, before following up with several other tweets joking about his alleged ignorance as a convert.

JD Flynn, the editor-in-chief of The Pillar, took a different angle, emphasizing that the New Testament is marked by prohibitions against denigrating “recent converts for being converts,” including St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and Christ’s parables.

“Like JD Vance’s theology or not, this ‘you’re a convert so shut up’ business is anti-Christian,” said Flynn, who began taking his baptismal Catholicism more seriously as a senior in high school after being brought up in an evangelical Christian milieu.

Father Beck, who is a chaplain at Manhattan University, could not be reached for comment prior to publication.

The Catholic Church does not prohibit recent converts from speaking about the faith, although new initiates are generally required to wait for some period before pursuing life-altering commitments like ordination to the priesthood or making religious vows.

Catholic converts in the U.S. have long complained that their views or credibility are often dismissed by cradle Catholics, especially liberals, based on their newcomer status. For instance, a 2022 book that portrayed the biblical scholar Scott Hahn as an American “Catholic fundamentalist” was widely panned for engaging in anti-convert bias.

Although he did not explicitly dismiss Vance’s theological views based on being a convert, progressive Catholic journalist Michael Sean Winters described Vance’s understanding of the ordo amoris as “sophomoric,” before poking at a different element of Vance’s biography to dismiss him.

“Call it hillbilly theology,” wrote Winters in a Feb. 13 column, making a reference to both Vance’s family roots in Appalachia and the memoir Vance wrote, and earning a rebuke from at least one of his publication’s readers.

In the Spotlight

Reactions to Vance’s use of the ordo amoris make clear that the vice president’s faith and its application to his politics has fast become an object of serious attention — and scrutiny — among Catholics in America and beyond.

Only the second Catholic U.S. vice president, Vance entered the Church in 2019 under the tutelage of East Coast Dominicans and has attributed his conversion largely to St. Augustine.

The vice president has demonstrated an unprecedented familiarity with some aspects of the Catholic intellectual tradition and said in 2019 that his views on the optimal state “are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching.” 

Vance is also associated with controversial Catholic postliberal figures like Pecknold and Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen, who argue for more robust government involvement in promoting the common good. And he is also engaged in “Catholic Twitter” in a way that seems unfathomable for the second highest ranking public official.

As a result of the somewhat unprecedented nature of Vance’s public Catholicism, the vice president’s every word and deed are deeply evaluated with their perceived connection with his faith. 

This has led some Catholics to praise Vance for his pro-family speech at the March for Life or his recent invocation of St. John Paul II, while others have criticized him for things like appearing to approve of abortion-pill access and promoting unfounded claims about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Ordo Amoris Convo Continues 

Reactions to Father Beck’s comments also criticized the priest’s description of the ordo amoris — a sign that conversation about the concept and its applicability to U.S. policy is alive and well, especially so after Pope Francis weighed in.

“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis wrote in his apparent critique of Vance, although, as some commentators have pointed out, the Pope has previously used the geometric image in his own description of how the family of the Church extends to all people.

New articles on the ordo amoris have continued to be published by Catholic entities almost daily since Vance used the term; some favorable, others critical. And secular media has also started looking into the concept, with The Associated Press even providing an explainer.

This means that whether his account is right or wrong, Vance’s willingness to draw from theological sources as vice president has kicked off a seemingly unprecedented engagement with Catholicism and its implications for public policy.