Long before Vice President JD Vance was received into the Catholic Church in 2019, his spiritual journey took a dramatic, quiet turn along a winding mountain pass between eastern Kentucky and North Carolina.
A young Marine preparing to deploy to Iraq, he was grieving the loss of his beloved grandmother — Mawmaw, the matriarch who had raised him. Driving back toward his military base, his car hit a curve in the road and began spinning out of control toward the edge of a mountain drop-off.
“It’s one of these roads where there is no — you know, you go off the side of the mountain and you’re probably not going to make it,” Vance told Raymond Arroyo in an interview that aired Oct. 22 on EWTN’s The World Over.
“And just like right at that point where I’m like, ‘All right, I’m about to go over the side of the mountain,’ the car just comes to a completely restful stop. Like God put His hand on that car and made it stop.”
To Vance, the moment carried an undeniable weight:
“I didn’t know what that moment meant to me at the time. It’s one of those things that’s always gnawed at me… this idea that
