JD Vance Praises Pope’s Pandemic Sermon for Bringing Him Peace After He Ran to Store to Stockpile Rice and Ammo

Vice President JD Vance praised Pope Francis for a 2020 sermon delivered during the Covid pandemic-19 that brought him solace after he fearfully stockpiled on ammunition and rice for his family on Friday.

Vance was met with applause throughout his address at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. on Friday, during which  he lauded President Donald Trump as a “defender of Christians” across the world/

Vance then acknowledged his January run-in with Pope Francis. At the time, the Pope issued Vance a stern rebuke from the Vatican after the vice president deployed a theological concept to defend the Trump administration’s mass deportation order.

During his address, Vance resisted reviving the debate, saying he did not want to “litigate” anything with the hospitalized Pope or any clergy on the matter, adding: “You obviously know my views.”

He’s a man who cares about the spiritual direction of the faith. I say this because everyday me and my children have said a prayer for the Holy Father and we pray for his health and we pray for his comfort as he deals with what appears to be a pretty serious health crisis.

Pivoting from there, he praised Pope Francis for words that had brought him comfort during the pandemic, even beginning to choke up as he retold the story:

While some of our media and our social media influencers and some of us fellow Catholics, I think, try to bring the Holy Father into every culture war battle in American politics, I will always remember the Holy Father whether he makes his way through this illness, and I hope he does, I will remember the Holy Father in March of 2020.

Growing emotional, Vance paused and continued:

At a time of incredible stress for the entire world, the height of the covid pandemic. None of us knew how bad it was. We heard reports from Italy of people dying in mass on ventilators and personally I had just welcomed our second child into the world and so, when the Covid pandemic happened, I had a three-week-old baby and went to Dick’s and bought 900 rounds of ammunition and Walmart and bought two bags of rice.

I sat with my rice and ammunition and said: ‘We are going to wait this thing out.’ And into that void when a lot of people did not know how bad it was and thankfully the pandemic is not as bad as the worse predictions. It was quite bad, not as bad as the worst convictions. The Holy Father gave a sermon that I return to consistently because it was incredibly meaningful to me at the time and remains meaningful today.

Vance read a prolonged excerpt from the sermon before leading the attendees in prayer for the Pope.

Watch above via Fox News.