THE new Pope has posted critical tweets about US vice president JD Vance.
Pope Leo XIV, the first pontiff from North America, held a Twitter/X account under his real name Robert Prevost, which he used to criticise Donald Trump’s deputy.
The new Pope did not tweet in 2024 but returned to the platform in 2025 to share an article about Vance’s claim that Christian teaching demanded a hierarchy of love.
Shortly before his death, Pope Francis wrote to US bishops criticising Trump's plans for mass deportations of immigrants, saying they were an offence to people's inherent dignity.
In a Fox News interview in January, the vice president (below) claimed: “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”
His argument sparked a fierce theological debate on the Catholic Church’s position on immigration, with some pointing to St Thomas Aquinas’s concept of ordo amoris – which places one’s immediate family at the top of a hierarchy of love which spreads downwards – in defence of Vance.
But an article published in the National Catholic Reporter, shared by Pope Leo before his election, said the concept of a hierarchy “feeds the myth that some people are more deserving of our care than others”.
Author Kat Armas wrote: “The love Jesus speaks of is not about calculation or a choice between our families or neighbors. It is not a finite resource to ration out, but a river that flows, wild and without restraint.”
The Pope, who was born in Chicago and served as Cardinal Bishop of Albano before his election, shared another article 10 days after the first from America, a Jesuit magazine, which said that Catholics "cannot support a rhetoric that demonizes immigrants as dangerously criminal simply because they have crossed the border in search of a better life for themselves and their families”.
The article added: “It ought to be clear that Catholics cannot celebrate aggressive deportation enforcement as a spectacle. It ought to be clear that Catholics cannot accept a theory of love that pats itself on the back for putting some of the poorest among us farthest from our concern and charity.”
His other tweets from this year are two praying for the health of Pope Francis (below) before his death on April 21 and a retweet of Catholic writer Rocco Palmo criticising Trump and Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele for laughing at the “illicit” deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
In April, the Supreme Court order Trump to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return from a notorious prison in El Salvador after he was accused of being a gang member, with the White House blaming an “administrative error” for his deportation.
Pope Leo XIV’s name has been interpreted as a political statement, as the last pope of that name wrote a foundational document of Catholic social teaching, Rerum Novarum, which argued for the rights of working people and trade unions and against unfettered capitalism.
Twitter/X users seized on the Pope’s social media activity as evidence he “hates” Vance. One account said: “The new pope appears to not have tweeted in 2024, returning only to pray for Pope Francis's health and criticize JD Vance.”
Another added: “Excellent job of maintaining continuity by picking another Pope who personally hates JD Vance.”
