Vice President JD Vance is known as a tech-savvy millennial. And the 40-year-old Catholic convert played the part Wednesday when he took to social media to directly respond to skeptical comments from a Register journalist about how his policy views align with his deeper commitments.

The subject was not immigration, a topic on which Vance’s use of Catholic theology to justify the Trump administration’s “America First” approach has been criticized by Catholic leaders, including Pope Francis.

Instead, the vice president waded into “Catholic Twitter” to defend his recent push for world powers to limit regulations of AI technology, which was the theme of his Feb. 11 speech at a global summit in Paris.

Vance responded directly to a post from a Register journalist that had suggested that the vice president’s call to not be “too risk adverse” regarding AI seemed to be in tension with his reputation as a “religious populist.”

Vance earned the reputation in part for his willingness to regulate industries like banking and train transportation as a U.S. senator and also for his embrace of a strand of Catholic political thought that emphasizes the government playing a more decisive role in promoting the common good.

His call for deregulating AI seemed to be a departure from those commitments, especially in light of the Vatican’s recent warnings that AI “requires careful regulation,” given its capacity to distort reality and undermine human dignity.

The post on X (formerly Twitter) also referenced a potential conflict between Vance and Elon Musk, the libertarian tech mogul who is playing an influential role in the Trump administration.

Vance responded to the suggestion of inevitable conflict directly.

“I’ll try to write something to address this in detail,” Vance wrote in his response. “But I think this civil war is overstated (though yes there are some real divergences between the populists and the techies).” The vice president then provided a brief account of why he favored a more deregulated approach to AI.

“In general: I dislike substituting American labor for cheap labor. My views on immigration and offshoring flow from this. I like growth and productivity gains, and this informs my view on tech and regulation,” he said in his Feb. 12 tweet on AI. Vance continued, “When it comes to AI specifically, the risks are 1) overstated or 2) difficult to avoid. One of my very real concerns, for instance, is about consumer fraud. That’s a valid reason to worry about ‘safety.’ But the problem is much worse if a peer nation is 6 months ahead of the US on AI.”

The vice president then ended his tweet with an indication that he thinks the topic deserves a deeper treatment. “Again, I’ll try to say more,” he said.

Niche Catholicism

Vance’s response is yet another indication of his burgeoning reputation as a smooth-operating social-media user, a status that the vice president has earned for what Politico described in a Feb. 10 piece as his “norm-breaking approach to political communication.”

In fact, one X user said that his response to the journalist’s comment — which did not directly link to Vance’s account, had been seen by less than 2,000 people at the time of the vice president’s reply, and was posted from a relatively obscure account that the vice president does not follow — was his “most anon” post ever.

“What a world we live in where the VP is a poaster,” said one priest in response to Vance’s reply, using a slang term that refers to a plugged-in X user.

But the vice president’s reply is also an indication that Vance, who became Catholic in 2019 under the tutelage of East Coast Dominicans and has written for the insider Catholic publication called The Lamp, pays attention to niche conversations within Catholic media in a way that seems unprecedented for such a high-ranking U.S. politician.

And while one user initially described the Register journalist’s post, which speculated about a “right-wing religious populist vs tech-bro libertarian” conflict within the White House, as “gibberish,” Vance’s response indicates that he not only understood the critique, but took it seriously enough to offer a substantive reply.

In Holy Hot Water

Vance’s social-media engagement with a Catholic journalist’s niche post also comes at a time when the vice president is in hot water with Church authorities, including with the Pope himself, for the administration’s rhetoric on immigration.

In an astonishingly direct Feb. 11 letter condemning the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” plans, Pope Francis also took aim at Vance’s usage of a theological concept called the ordo amoris to justify the U.S. government’s prioritization of its own citizens before foreigners.

On Jan. 30, Vance had suggested (in a post on X, of course) that the concept, which was developed by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, supported the idea that one ought to first love those to whom they have God-given responsibilities, like one’s family or fellow citizens.

Pope Francis retorted in his letter that “the true ordo amoris” needed to be grounded in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, “that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” wrote the Pope, who did not name Vance directly.

In previous weeks, U.S. bishops have pushed back against the vice president’s assertion that they engaged in federally funded refugee and migration programs, in part, to boost their financial “bottom line.”

“That’s just scurrilous,” said Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, in response. ”It’s very nasty, and it’s not true.”

Fuller Response Forthcoming?

To this point, Vance has not directly addressed these criticisms regarding his immigration rhetoric from some of the Catholic Church’s highest authorities.

But his recent engagement with a Catholic journalist’s low-visibility post about his views on AI and how they relate to his “religious populist” reputation indicates that he is likely paying close attention to conversations among the Catholic chattering class — and eager to weigh in when he deems it appropriate.

Still, significant gaps remain in Vance’s support for deregulated AI and the common refrain coming from Church leaders.

In Paris, Vance warned that excessive regulation could cripple growth in the AI industry, a sector that he framed as poised to offer unprecedented job growth. The vice president also criticized foreign governments for “tightening the screws” on U.S. tech companies and pledged that America would continue to be a leader in AI innovation.

The Vatican, meanwhile, has struck a posture towards AI that could be described as open, but deeply cautious.

This has included a document from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Jan. 14, Antiqua et Nova, which is dedicated to the relationship between AI and human intelligence.

And Pope Francis sent a message to the same Paris summit where Vance made his speech, reiterating his call for adequate “safeguards” of AI in order to protect against its potentially harmful effects.

“I therefore appreciate the efforts under way to embark with courage and determination upon a political process aimed at defending humanity from a use of artificial intelligence that could ‘limit our worldview to realities expressible in numbers and enclosed in predetermined categories, thereby excluding the contribution of other forms of truth and imposing uniform anthropological, socio-economic and cultural models,’” the Pope said to the Paris summit’s attendees, which included tech CEOs and heads of state.

Vance did not directly address some of Church leadership’s concerns with AI in his recent social-media reply, other than to say that the risks associated with the technology were overstated or unavoidable.

But given the vice president’s promise to address the topic more fully — and his apparent interest in engaging with Catholic media so directly — a response addressing those concerns should be expected.