Pope Francis, JD Vance, And The Cultural Significance Of Los Desaparecidos
Another reason the pope had such disdain for our sinful vice president
On Easter Sunday, a grudging but magnanimous Pope Francis received JD Vance for a briefer visit than he’d normally extend to a sitting U.S. vice president—and within 24 hours he was dead.
We’ve been awash in memes ever since, a few of them quite exceptional, if macabre humor, too soon, is your thing.
As satire, these hark back to 2024, when Tim Walz made issue and mockery of MAGA rightists, their affects and insecurities. They express a widely held view that Francis was a fundamentally decent person, while Vance is an imperious and increasingly nasty creep.
But the pope wasn’t reluctant to give Vance an audience because he’s weird and unlikeable.
Francis was always a stern critic of the Trump movement and its disdain for immigrants. He was a champion of refugees in Europe before Trump became president, and abhorred international indifference to, and abuse of, people fleeing danger to build better lives. His views were rooted in scripture, in his vocational experience as a clergyman, and in his personal experience as the son of immigrants. It was a touchstone of his papacy.
This placed Vance, a relatively recent convert to Catholicism, in a difficult spot, and he tried to resolve the cognitive dissonance by asserting a false harmony between church teaching and his own administration’s gleeful harassment of immigrants.
Francis rightly scolded him for sacrilege.
The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.
That was early February, before the Trump administration carried out its first deportation flights—when it was in the midst of obliterating USAID, sealing the fates of foreign poor children who’ve since died.
Things have deteriorated since then, and I find myself wondering if there’s a story—for someone else to tell—about Francis’s increasing revulsion, as the Trump administration adjusted its approach: from the goal of mass deportation to the more chilling practice of driving immigrants and dissidents into hiding by disappearing people.
DUNGEONS AND GRAND DRAGONS
The tactic of forced disappearance has been prevalent enough in Spanish-language societies that they have a specific term for its victims: desaparecidos.
This was also part of Francis’s vocational experience. He was a Jesuit provincial of Argentina when a junta took control of the country in 1976 and he had to balance his commitment to human rights, along with his obligation to protect his flock, with the limits of his power. He believed he could not responsibly or safely be a vocal critic of a murderous regime, but he did try to help and hide those he could. By many accounts, though not all, he acquitted himself well under difficult circumstances. He would nevertheless lead the bishops of Argentina to apologize on behalf of the church for failing to do more. His reticence, relative to those who resisted the military junta more directly, became a source of controversy when he ascended to the papacy 40 years later.
I am not a Catholic and haven’t taken much lay interest in the history or teachings of the church. But I learned some of this history before Jorge Bergoglio became Pope Francis, because I did take an interest in the Argentine junta, and los desaparecidos, and U.S. Cold War-era support for right-wing dictatorships in Latin America more broadly.
My mother emigrated from Chile to the U.S. before the Augusto Pinochet coup d’etat, but left family and friends behind. My brother, living with his father in his teenage years, joined the Marxist resistance to Pinochet’s military dictatorship. I can remember my mother’s relief when Pinochet lost power, and her excitement a few years later when he was indicted by a Spanish magistrate.
When I was between jobs in 2008, I visited Argentina and Chile, mostly for recreation, but also to learn about and report on efforts over decades to find the remains of missing Argentinos, and reunite children—many of whom were born in captivity—with the biological relatives of their disappeared parents.