JD Vance wants better US-Vatican relations, but is he the man to build the relationship?

U.S. Vice President JD Vance wants the United States and the Holy See to have a different sort of relationship – and a better one than they have now – more like the one the parties enjoyed during the Reagan era.

That’s a lofty goal, and a very tall order.

Pope St. John Paul II and Ronald Reagan were towering figures whose personal charisma and institutional canniness famously worked in concert to bring down the Soviet empire.

John Paul yields to no one in his advocacy for peace, but he also understood global political reality. He and Reagan did not always perfectly – or at all – agree on ways and means to achieve their common goals.

In a way, however, they were the quintessentially Chestertonian partners who could “disagree about everything else” precisely because they did “agree about everything.”

Whether Vance is the fellow to foster such a relationship, well, that is another question.

Also – and the importance of this can’t be stressed enough – the Reagan era ended in 1988, which is as far removed from the present day as WWII was to my generation when we were in middle school, while Vance was born in