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Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, Feb. 28, 2025

February 28, 2025 · The White House · 0:32:45

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Vice President JD Vance — a Catholic convert speaking to a Catholic audience — delivered the keynote at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., on February 28, 2025. He joked at the top that he had not yet figured out how to work his government computer and was winging the speech thirty days in, then turned to the administration’s record as he presented it: “between protecting the rights of pro-life protesters, between ensuring that we have an opportunity to protect the rights of the unborn in the first place, and importantly protecting the religious liberty of all people but in particular Catholics, I think that we can say that President Trump, though not a Catholic himself, has been an incredibly good president for Catholics in the United States of America.” He contrasted that record with the prior administration, which he accused of jailing people for silently praying outside pro-life clinics.

Vance extended the religious-liberty argument to foreign policy: the administration’s pursuit of peace — “whether it’s in Russia and Ukraine, whether it’s in the Middle East” — should also be recognized, he said, as an effort to protect the religious liberty of Christians, since historic Christian communities have often borne the brunt of failed American foreign policy; he cited persecuted Nigerian priests he had learned of at the previous year’s breakfast. He added that protecting the rights of conscience at home is “not enough” on its own — the biggest impediments to religious liberty, he argued, often have nothing to do with government.

Why it matters

The Prayer Breakfast speech is Vance’s signature faith address of the administration’s opening months: it binds the domestic religious-liberty and pro-life record to a foreign-policy rationale in the Vice President’s own theological framing, delivered to the constituency where his personal conversion gives him standing.

Sources: The White House, “Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast” (official upload, embedded above; Washington, D.C.). Remarks as delivered; transcript reviewed in the site’s private research store.