‘Who?!’: JD Vance Forgets Name Of Senior Vatican Official In Latest Religious Blunder | EUROtoday

Vice President JD Vance wanted a fast reminder from the press on Wednesday after he appeared to overlook the title of a senior Vatican official who reportedly confronted hostility from U.S. navy brass earlier this yr.

“Who?!” requested Vance after a reporter named Cardinal Christophe Pierre, who served because the Holy See’s former ambassador to the U.S. from 2016 till March.

“With no disrespect to the cardinal, I don’t know who Cardinal Christophe Pierre is.”

The veep, who’s Catholic, was requested a couple of latest report by The Free Press that outlined tensions between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV.

The Bari Weiss-founded outlet — citing unnamed Vatican sources— reported that Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of protection for coverage, known as Pierre to a closed-door assembly in January the place he flexed the U.S. navy’s energy to do “whatever it wants in the world,” earlier than telling him that the Catholic Church “better take its side.”

Officials known as the assembly in response to the pontiff taking intention at those that rule through “a diplomacy based on force” and a “zeal for war” in a speech earlier in January, per the Letters from Leo web page on Substack.

The assembly reportedly alarmed some Vatican officers and led to the cancellation of plans for the American-born pope to go to the U.S. on July 4 for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon has denied the reporting, describing the assembly as a “respectful and reasonable discussion.”

Vance, moments after the reporter named Pierre’s function as a diplomat, remarked, “Oh, OK, OK! I — I’ve met him before. Sorry, I just didn’t remember the name.”

He went on to say he by no means noticed The Free Press’ reporting on the assembly, including that he wished to speak to the cardinal and officers within the administration to “figure out what actually happened.”

Vance’s obvious reminiscence lapse arrives a bit over every week after an eagle-eyed reporter at The Bulwark noticed a United Methodist church in Virginia on the Appalachia-esque cowl of the vp’s upcoming guide “Communion.”

The guide is ready to element Vance’s “personal journey” again to Catholicism, so the not-so-Catholic home of worship’s spot on the duvet confused its congregants, who famous that the church has no connections to Vance nor his Christian denomination.

A spokesperson for HarperCollins advised USA Today that the picture was picked for the duvet as a result of it “comes from the part of the country where Vance grew up.”

(Note: Middletown, Ohio — the place Vance was born and raised — is a virtually six-hour drive to the positioning of the church, per Google Maps. The metropolis the place he spent summers with relations — Jackson, Kentucky — can also be practically 4 hours away by automobile.)