The National Catholic Register — flagship organ of the conciliar sect’s “conservative” wing — publishes a laudatory review of Vice President JD Vance’s memoir *Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith*, penned by its managing editor Jonathan Liedl. The article presents Vance’s narrative of pragmatic conversion and his thesis that Christianity should function as America’s “creedal ethos,” informing social values and economic policy through political intervention. This is not a call to the Social Reign of Christ the King but a baptism of Christian nationalism, reducing the supernatural order to a cultural utility for civilizational maintenance. The review itself, by omitting the supernatural finality of the Faith and treating grace as a psychological resource, exposes the thoroughgoing naturalism of the neo-church’s intellectual class.
The Pragmatist’s Conversion: Grace Reduced to Self-Improvement
The article recounts that Vance “was attracted to Catholicism by the Church’s account of character formation as a slow, grace-aided process of growing in virtue” and that he returned to faith because “it would make him a better man.” His wife’s verdict — “Therapy didn’t work for you. But church does” — is offered as confirmation. This is the religion of the homo economicus: Christ as life-coach, the Church as a self-actualization program. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines conversion as “a turning away from sin and a turning to God,” wrought by actual grace illuminating the intellect and moving the will to supernatural ends. Vance’s “conversion” is explicitly ordered to temporal betterment — patience, forgiveness, familial stability. The Summa Theologiae (I-II, q. 113, a. 9) teaches that justification requires the infusion of sanctifying grace, not the acquisition of natural virtues. The article’s silence on original sin, the necessity of baptismal regeneration, the state of grace, and the final judgment is not an oversight; it is the hallmark of a religion that has ceased to be Catholic.
Christ the King vs. “Creedal Ethos”: The Usurpation of Divine Rights
Vance proposes Christianity as the nation’s “shared moral language,” its “creed.” Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), condemns this precise reduction: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The encyclical declares that “the State must leave the same freedom to the members of Orders… who are indeed the most valiant helpers of the Pastors of the Church” and that “rulers of states… have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him.” Vance’s “creedal ethos” is a laicist substitute for the Social Kingship of Christ. It accepts the Masonic separation of Church and State — condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus (Error 55: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church”) — and attempts to smuggle Christian “values” back into the public square as a cultural consensus. This is the error of liberal Catholicism condemned by Leo XIII in Immortale Dei (1885): “The Church… cannot… accept the favor of a legislation which would place her on a level with false religions.”
Political Messianism: The State as Savior
The review notes Vance’s “postliberalism,” which “sees state power as an important tool for promoting the common good” and cites his suggestion that “churches will struggle to attract working-class people if those people are forced to work on Sundays, suggesting the need for political intervention.” This is Caesaropapism inverted: the State becomes the guardian of ecclesiastical discipline. St. Pius X, in Notre Charge Apostolique (1910), denounced the Sillon’s “city of the future” where “the State… would be the sole master.” The Syllabus (Error 45) condemns the proposition that “the entire government of public schools… may and ought to appertain to the civil power.” Vance’s program — using tax policy, labor law, and state power to engineer a “culture of virtue” — is the Civitas Dei without God, the City of Man draped in Christian vocabulary. The article admits the thesis is “experimental” and lacks “contemporary examples of countries that have successfully spurred Christian renewal through political intervention,” citing Hungary’s failure. It concedes that “societal factors can lead a horse to holy water, but they can’t make it get baptized.” This admission destroys the entire premise: grace is not a byproduct of policy.
The Conciliar Sect’s “Conservative” Face: Managing the Apostasy
Jonathan Liedl, a graduate of the “University of Notre Dame” and “Saint Paul Seminary” — institutions wholly subsumed into the neo-church — frames Vance’s naturalism as a legitimate Catholic option. The National Catholic Register is an organ of the “bishops” of the conciliar sect, men who have implemented the Novus Ordo, religious liberty, and ecumenism — all condemned by pre-1958 Magisterium. Vance’s 2019 “conversion” was into this structure, not the Catholic Church. The Defense of Sedevacantism demonstrates that a manifest heretic loses office ipso facto (Bellarmine, De Romano Pontifice; Canon 188.4, 1917 Code). The line of usurpers from John XXIII to “Leo XIV” (Robert Prevost) has promulgated heresies (religious liberty, collegiality, false ecumenism) that sever them from the Church. Vance is a “Catholic” only in the sense that the False Fatima Apparitions document describes: a product of the “Masonic operation” that substitutes sentimental piety for the Social Reign of Christ the King. His “faith” is the faith of the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place.
Silence on the Supernatural: The Gravest Accusation
The article does not mention the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the sacraments, the Real Presence, the Virgin Mary (except as a cultural symbol), the communion of saints, purgatory, hell, or the necessity of the Church for salvation (Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus). It speaks of “fruit,” “witness,” “community,” “virtue,” “culture.” This is the Modernist program condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) and Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907): “The dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief” (Proposition 26). Vance’s Christianity is a vital immanence, a religious experience validated by its utility. The review’s closing counsel — that Christians should remember “the primary factor that led to Vance’s conversion… the ‘true witness’ of Christian believers” — is pure Protestant subjectivism: the Church as a community of witnesses, not the Una, Sancta, Catholica, et Apostolica instituted by Christ for the salvation of souls.
Conclusion: A Catholic Vice President for the Antichurch
Vance’s *Communion* is not a Catholic book reviewed by a Catholic journal. It is a manifesto of Christian nationalism — the latest avatar of the Revolution — published by the conciliar sect’s house organ to acclimate the faithful to a political order that acknowledges Christ only as a cultural resource. The true Church, perennitas of the Traditio, knows one King: Christus Vincit, Christus Regnat, Christus Imperat. She knows one politics: the Rights of God before the rights of man. She knows one conversion: Converte nos, Deus, salutaris noster — not “Therapy didn’t work. Church does.” The National Catholic Register, JD Vance, and the entire “postliberal” project are blind guides leading the blind into the ditch (Mt 15:14). Non praevalebunt.
Source:
JD Vance’s Pitch for a National Reversion (ncregister.com)
Date: 14.07.2026