Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance discussed their family’s Mass attendance practices ahead of the release of Vance’s memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” which is available June 16.
JD Vance is the second Catholic to serve as U.S. vice president, following President Joe Biden, who held the office from 2009 to 2017. Vance has discussed his Catholic faith and shared about his conversion but is not seen or reported by the media attending Mass in the Washington, D.C., area.
Vance said in a June 14 interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” that Mass is sometimes said in his home or he attends small churches.
Having priests come to celebrate Mass at home is “one of the rare privileges of this life,” Vance said.
“I try not to do it too much” because “I try to … have a little bit more of a ritual to it,” he said. “So we do try to leave the house and actually go to church. And thatʼs important.”
“But sometimes … you have a late day at work, or somethingʼs going on at the White House, or somethingʼs going on in the world and you say, ‘Could a priest just come by and say Mass at our house?’” Vance said.
“It makes it very easy, but itʼs one of those creature comforts of being vice president I try not to use too much because I think it makes us a little lazy,” he said.
“Itʼs a perk,” Usha Vance added. “But I think itʼs also important to say that itʼs sometimes a necessity, because a motorcade just shuts down streets.”
“It means sometimes people canʼt get into Mass when they arrive,” she said. “It means that you have people trickling in after the start because theyʼre being put through magnetometers.”
The second lady, who practices Hinduism, said they try to adjust the “timing of Mass and location” in order “to mitigate all of these discomforts for all the other people who are just trying to live their lives.”
“We try to go to smaller churches and we try to get there exactly on time, because if we get there 10 minutes earlier,” security becomes “a nightmare for everybody else,” JD Vance said.
“So you try to obviously take your kids to church, but you also try to do it in a way that doesnʼt inconvenience everybody. Thatʼs very important to us,” he said.
Vance has attended some highly publicized liturgies. The vice president attended Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural Mass on May 18, 2025, in St. Peter’s Square. He led the U.S. delegation for the ceremony and was joined by Usha Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
He also attended a private Mass celebrated by Franciscan monks at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem during a three-day diplomatic trip to Israel in October 2025.
Vance met with a group of bishops and went to confession prior to Mass, according to the White House press pool report.
Memoir on Vance’s Catholic conversion
Vance’s memoir discusses why he left his faith and describes his conversion to Catholicism.
The book has been published by HarperCollins Publishers, which also produced Vance’s 2016 bestselling book “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.”
The book addresses the “story of how I regained my faith,” which “only happened because I had lost it to begin with,” Vance wrote in a HarperCollins press release. “The interesting question that hangs over this book, and over my mind, is why I ever strayed from the path. Why the Christian faith of my youth failed to properly take root.”
In the “CBS Sunday Morning” interview, Vance explained some of what the book uncovers about finding his “home” in the Catholic Church.
“I was raised in evangelical tradition that in a lot of ways I really loved,” he said.
The evangelical faith offered an “incredible generosity of spirit” and an “incredible spirit of ‘welcomingness,’” Vance said.
While he said he still tries to “apply” these aspects to his life, he “drift[ed] away from that faith.”
“I donʼt think that I was properly rooted,” Vance said. “I started to see myself as too smart, maybe too high-minded. I was going to make decisions based on rationality and science and not on this religious mumbo jumbo.”
Then, he said, “as I started to think to myself, ‘Maybe there is some real truth to these Christian ideas that I grew up with‘ … I was just incredibly attracted to the tradition of the church that I ultimately selected.”
“Things are constantly changing. Social media is changing how we communicate with each other,” he said. “You go to one church and itʼs … one thing. You go to another church and itʼs something different.”
Catholicism “felt rooted” and “if I went to a foreign country and I didnʼt understand the language, I kind of knew what was going on. And I liked that feeling of rootedness.”
“Fundamentally, when I started thinking to myself, ‘Maybe I do believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Maybe I do believe in the core tenets of the Christian faith.’ A lot of the people who [were] encouraging me on that journey … were Catholic, and they took me to Catholic churches, and I felt at home there, and eventually I converted,” Vance said.
“God put a lot of people in my path who were very good Christians and ended up being Catholics. And thatʼs where … I found a home,” he said.