My friend Annie sent this to me by email and I knew I had to post it on this website. Why would anyone who was raised a Protestant be attracted to the Catholic Church? According to what JD Vance had to say, it sounds like he wasn’t taught hardly any doctrines from God’s Word in the Holy Scriptures, the Bible. I went the opposite direction, from Catholicism to Bible based Protestant faith in Jesus Christ as my sole mediator to the Father. Jesus became my Lord, Redeemer and Savior. I used to pray also to Mary, Joseph, and the saints. The Catholic faith was all I knew as a kid growing up in Chicago. It was only after I entered the USAF and was stationed in California when I first heard the Gospel. JD Vance never heard a Bible based Gospel message of salvation through Jesus Christ alone through faith alone through God’s grace alone?

Transcription

Interviewer: So you were raised a non-denominational Christian. I understand you were never baptized. You’ve also said you went through an angry atheist phase. But in 2019, you took the plunge and you were received into the Catholic Church. (Tremendous applause.) Tell us about that journey.

JD Vance: Well, first it’s good to be home and I do think the Catholic Church is my home. (Applause.) But I’m reminded of something my Mamaw (his grandmother) once told me.

When you’re in Marine Corps boot camp, you don’t get to make phone calls home. You can only write letters. And I was always writing letters home to Mamaw and she would write me one, two, sometimes even three times a day. I got so many letters from Mamaw.

One of my favorite Marine Corps boot camp letters is that I asked Mamaw, there are the Catholics, the people go to Catholic Church, the people go to Protestant Church. Why do the Catholics get to go to church for so long? Right. The Catholics always go to church for much longer.

That’s the best thing you do in boot camp because that’s the one thing where the drill instructors don’t yell at you the whole time. (Laughter.)

And she said, “You know, honey, just go to the Catholic service. Like it doesn’t matter. Just go to the Catholic service.”

Because in southeastern Kentucky, where she was from, she said, even the Episcopalians are snake handlers. So it doesn’t really matter. It’s all, to her, it was all about Jesus. Even though the Catholic Church was a little foreign to her, it was all about Jesus.

And, you know, to me, look, there are all these ways that I could over-intellectualize the way that I became a Catholic. I mean, the simple fact is, I think that Christianity, broadly speaking, answered important questions about character and virtue that my elite educational credentials were not answering for me. I think that Yale Law School, where I went to law school, was all about getting the best degree, going to the best school, and getting the best job. And these things weren’t making me a good person, but Christianity was asking me to ask much more important questions. Like, how do you treat this girl that you’ve fallen in love with, the girl that I eventually married? How do you be a good person? How do you eventually become a good father? That, to me, was a fundamentally Christian worldview. And so that led me back to Christianity writ large.

But why did I become a Catholic? I mean, there are all these things that I could point to, but, you know, one, I really liked that the Catholic Church was just really old. I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux. The things that you believed 10 years ago were no longer even acceptable to believe 10 years later. The Catholic Church was just very old.

I liked the fact that I felt like it had stood really strong on some of the core moral issues. You know, I’m a very pro-life person. I’ve been pro-life since I was 14 years old. (Applause.)

But I think anybody who’s looked at the history of the American Christian conservative movement would give a lot of credit to the Catholic Church for pushing that movement in a more pro-life direction, especially in the 1970s. But it was just, you know, a lot of the people who were really, really influential to me as I thought about how to be a good Christian in this new era of my life were Catholics.

One of the great things about coming to this conference is that I’ve gotten to reconnect with Father Dominic Legge. Father Dominic was the first priest that I spoke to about becoming a Catholic, and just a lot of really good people who took their faith very seriously were Catholics, and it felt like a natural home for me.

(End of transcript.)

To me, this is all about the failure of Protestant churches in America. For JD Vance’s grandmother to tell him it doesn’t matter what church he goes to tells me she doesn’t know the Bible very well.

If you are a regular reader of this website or are knowledgeable about the history of the Jesuit Order, you know that the Jesuits are responsible for the assassinations of four US Presidents: Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901 and John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Based on history what do you think would happen to Donald Trump if he defied his Jesuit advisors? They would take him out and Catholic Vance would become the next president.

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