JD Vance’s Bishop Wants Catholic Politicians To Do What’s Right

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA — Bishop Michael Burbidge is aware that a good percentage of the 432,700 Catholics in his flock are politically important.

“One of the first shocks I experienced when I became the Bishop of Arlington was being in this office and looking out and seeing the Capitol and the Washington Monument from my window,” Burbidge told The Daily Wire in a recent interview. “There are some heavy hitters here who are influencing our country’s politics.”

For about two years, those heavy hitters included Vice President JD Vance, who, as a first-term senator from Ohio, settled his family in Northern Virginia. Vance’s Catholicism has been a central part of his identity since his 2019 baptism — back when he was still just “the author of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’” and a promising young man.

Vance, who tells the story of his faith journey in a forthcoming book, “Communion,” may have broken the land speed record for transition from catechumen to prominent Catholic. By the time Donald Trump asked him to join the presidential ticket, he was one of the most well-known American Catholics, second only to the man he and Trump were running to succeed.

Once in office, Vance became the locus for Catholic critiques of the Trump administration’s foreign policy and immigration crackdown — which earned the White House rebukes from Pope Francis and now Pope Leo XIV, whose elevation to the Throne of St. Peter moved Vance a few notches down the list of prominent American Catholics.

Burbidge knows all of this. He’s met Vance, he says, but hasn’t had a formal meeting with him since he became vice president. And Burbidge realizes the vice president has a particular challenge before him, not just as a Catholic leader, but one with a countryman in Rome. But the bishop — who encouraged Trump and Vance in January 2025 to “develop a national immigration policy that reflects the Catholic commitment to human dignity and the common good” — stressed that Vance has all the tools he needs to navigate choppy theological-political waters.

“We have a mandate to be not only citizens, but to be faithful citizens,” Burbidge says. “You can’t separate what you know to be true and what you profess to believe into your life as a politician. And will you have to pay a price for that sometimes? Of course you will. Will you maybe be rejected by others? Of course you will. But there’s no other path.”

“This is what’s so great about being Catholic,” the bishop adds. “There’s a consistency of the gospel of life and the truth.”

“Now, does this become more challenging for a politician? I’m sure it does. But you can’t be one person here and another person here.”

A Philadelphia native ordained in 1984, Burbidge began his episcopal journey as the auxiliary bishop of his hometown in 2002. Named bishop of Raleigh in 2006 by Pope Benedict XVI, he held that post for a decade before Pope Francis named him the fourth bishop of Arlington. It’s a role to which Burbidge — a polished speaker unafraid to preach the “gospel of life” to all manner of politicians — seems uniquely suited.

“It really doesn’t matter who’s in office,” Burbidge says when asked how he’s navigated the transition from President Joe Biden, a Catholic who flouted the Church’s teaching on abortion, to Trump and Vance, whose paeans to the faith have not kept them out of the fray.

“It’s always going to be a challenge, because [the Catholic Church is] so beautiful, the way we teach the gospel of life. It confuses people that we can be on this side or that side, but the truth of the gospel, what we’re teaching doesn’t change because of who’s in office.”

The bishop certainly practices what he’s preaching here. Burbidge issued his statement on immigration less than two weeks after Inauguration Day, reminding the Trump team of the Church’s stance before it had finished unpacking.

Burbidge had plenty of practice dealing with politicians by this point. From 2022 to 2024, he chaired the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Pro-Life Activities Committee. In that role, he chastised Biden for “causing great scandal when he announces both his faith and his pro-abortion position publicly,” calling on the president to “repent.”

Still, Burbidge goes out of his way to stress that his role is no different than that of other bishops. He does not tell his priests to preach to the powerful in the pews and thinks there “should be no effort at all” for priests to do that.

For all that’s happening in the American church, Burbidge is most excited about the things that get bishops excited: seven ordinations this year and 12 in 2025; 39 active seminarians; mass attendance rebounding to pre-COVID numbers; 27 George Mason students brought into the church this Easter alone, the work of just one campus priest.

“We have so many young adults who are fully engaged in the life of the church,” Burbidge says. “We are very, very blessed with vocations … and we have so many beautiful holy families, holy marriages, from which vocations so often come.”

With a flourishing diocese and rising levels of religiosity among young Americans, Burbidge is optimistic about the future of the country and the church. And he sees even more reason for hope in Pope Leo, whom he praises for “the serenity and the simplicity and the joy” he has projected in his first year as pontiff.

“I think it was a blessing, a gift, that he knows the United States,” Burbidge says. “He’s lived here, he’s from here. He speaks the language. He gets us, and I think he understands us, in our politics and our culture and things like that.”

One might say it’s providential, the ascension of an American pope at the dawn of a very Catholic age in American politics. Abortion and immigration, the twin issues of our time, make it clear that Catholic social teaching does not cleave easily along party lines. And yet, the days of Catholics sidestepping politics seem to be over.

The Republican nominee for president in 2028 will almost certainly be Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio, both Catholics. And at least two Democratic frontrunners — California Governor Gavin Newsom and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — are proximately Catholic as well. Our nation’s next presidential election may not just be a referendum on competing political systems, but competing conceptions of Catholicism.

Regardless of whether that happens, American Catholics will certainly be glad to have one of their own leading the church in the coming years. But perhaps they’ll also look to a prelate just two years younger than Pope Leo, another son of a great American city whose ordination came almost two years to the day of the Holy Father’s.

“As a bishop, I have to have full responsibility for every soul entrusted to me,” Burbidge says. “And therefore, I have to speak truth and love, and love involves speaking the truth.”

“So, I think that if you’re a Catholic and you’re running for office, your bishop’s going to be talking to you.”