Second Lady Usha Vance is opening up about her husband Vice President JD Vance’s faith and failed attempts at conventional mental health therapy.
“It’s not that therapy doesn’t work for other people,” Usha, 40, told CBS’ Sunday Morning national correspondent Robert Costa on the Sunday, June 14, episode of the news program, confirming that she once told her husband, “Therapy didn’t work for you, church does.”
“JD just didn’t have the right kind of trust in that [therapy] process,” Usha continued. “He just didn’t feel at home in it, really exploring some of the feelings that he had in trying to figure out how he wanted to be the person that he wanted to be for the rest of his life.”
The vice president, 41, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, says part of his constant and relentless search for something that makes him feel “rooted” and “grounded” comes from his tumultuous upbringing in Middletown, Ohio, with divorced parents who split when he was a toddler and a mother who struggled with substance abuse issues.
“I grew up in some ways in a very non-traditional household,” JD explained in the same Sunday interview. “Revolving door of people coming in, people coming out. Raised by my grandparents at some points and my parents at some points — my mom, my dad. So there was a certain movement and chaos to my youth. And I do think that I was searching for something that, again, was a little more rooted and a little more stable.”
Despite his faith bringing him a sense of self-understanding and direction, JD has found himself at odds with the leader of his Catholic faith, Pope Leo XIV, over his alliance with President Donald Trump’s and his controversial administrative priorities, including immigration and the war in Iran.
“When it comes to disagreements with the Vatican, we’re going to have disagreements from time to time,” the vice president told Fox News back in April. “I think it’s a good thing, actually, that the Pope is advocating for the things that he cares about. But we’re always going to have disagreements on matters of public policy.”
JD added at the time, “The Pope has been critical of our immigration policy, but ultimately the immigration policy of the United States is set by Donald Trump. The Pope is going to have disagreements on other issues. We certainly respect the Pope, we certainly have a good relationship with the Vatican.”
Despite the vice president’s claims that the Trump administration is on good terms with the leader of the Catholic faith, the president himself has taken public and seemingly personal aim at Pope Frances.
“[The Pope] talks about ‘fear’ of the Trump administration, but doesn’t mention the FEAR that the Catholic Church, and all other Christian Organizations, had during COVID when they were arresting priests, ministers, and everybody else, for holding Church Services, even when going outside and being ten and even twenty feet apart,” Trump claimed via his social media platform, Truth Social, on April 12, going on to call the Pope “weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy.”
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