My Thoughts on the Vice President's New Book, "Communion" | August 16, 2026

I just finished J.D. Vance’s “Communion: My Return to Faith,” and what stays with us is not a campaign story but a spiritual one: a man formed by instability, wounded family life, and the wider ache of Middle America after deindustrialization and the opioid crisis, trying to find a foundation that won’t crumble when life gets loud.

The search turns intellectual and moral as Catholic social teaching enters the picture, especially Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and the Church’s insistence on human dignity, a living wage, and an economy ordered toward human flourishing. We also talk about what attracts him to Catholic stability: a durable tradition, shared doctrine, and a practical way of life that includes Mass, confession, Lent, and raising kids in a faith that can outlast moods and trends. If you’ve ever felt the gap between what you’ve achieved and what you actually need, this conversation may feel familiar.

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

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Welcome And A Book Worth Reading

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This is living Catholic faith with Father Don Wolf. Deals with Living Catholic faith in the time. And now you're hoping Father Don Wolf.

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Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm Monsignor Don Wolfe, rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother, and I just finished the book by the Vice President J.D. Vance, the book called Communion. It's the history of his church for rel his search for religious identity in his life and his ultimate decision to enter the Catholic Church. It's a book worth reading, especially for us Catholics. There's only a little politics in it, certainly not any more than a reader would expect from a nationally famous politician. It's truly a story about a man who spent a long time seeking to find deeper meaning in his life and then found it in the Catholic Church. Most significantly, the subtitle of the book is My Return to Faith. The author's journey was his effort to find the bedrock of faith that he had lost amid the twisting pathways of his life, so that he could find a sure foundation in the church. It's a book I'd like my nieces and nephews to read. In many ways, it's a lighter and more positive follow-on to the book that truly made him famous, his autobiography journey recounted in Hillbilly Elegy. That book propelled his story into the national spotlight and made him into a spokesman for his generation, or at least that portion of the generation left behind after the earthquake of deindustrialization and the plague of opioid abuse in the American Midwest. In his telling, he didn't pretty up his scarred upbringing or romanticize his generation, which made his voice important to hear. It was heard by a lot of people and ended up being widely celebrated. It's safe to say that book propelled him into the vice presidency. This new book is a continuation of his journey into the decisions to put his life together in the midst of the traumas that had marked him. We should pay attention to him at first for no other reason than this fact that made his that made it than the fact that his first book made him vice president. I know there isn't a straight line between writing and publishing his autobiography and then being elected on the Republican ticket, but the line does go from his book to his place in the administration. And whether you agree or disagree with his politics or the position he represents, you should note that he wrote a book that changed things for him in gigantic ways. It might not seem to be all that notable, but there aren't many books or many authors able to achieve that kind of status. Writing is a mystery enacted between the author and the reader. It's never fully plumbed simply by noting that something was written and then it was read. Hillbilly elegy touched the deepest foundations of those who read it, which meant J.D. Vance had something to say, and the saying of it mattered to millions. This mere fact is enough to invite us to pause and notice what else he might have to say. It's an invitation, it's not a guarantee, but it's a good enough bet to invest a little time and money to see what's there.

A Childhood Of Fragmented Church Life

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Vance begins his book by acknowledging his restless religious spirit. He'd grown up inside the religious ferment of his family. This was as broken and inconsistent as the rest of his life was. Shunted between his mother and his stepfather and his grandparents, he was never securely a part of any particular religious expression or community. Sometimes he'd go to the Pentecostal church, at other times it would be Baptist or nondenominational, or wherever those who were taking care of him decided to go. Most of the time they weren't connected to any place in particular, and there were long gaps between Sunday services. All of this was part of the insubstantiality he suffered as a child and as a young man. His experience was always temporary, always in motion. There was a solid substrate. His grandmother, who was the bedrock of his life, was a believer and was insistent on the importance of some connection to faith and practice. She wasn't fanatical in her connection to any group, and in line with her background, she was devotedly anti-Catholic. But in all the upset and tumult of her life amid the lives of her grandkids, she insisted on the importance of belief. She was an indifference to whether her family believed in Jesus and the gospel, even when that belief was not acted out in any substantial way. Perhaps just as important as his grandmother was his grandfather on the other side of the family. He was patient and stoic, less moved by the currents of the day and more solid in his devotion. He read the Bible and was firmly and regularly connected to the life and practice of the belief, although it was mostly personal and not very institutional. Not unimportantly, though, he also suffered a great deal with the illness that eventually took his life. His practice and perseverance were important influences on the young J.D. He was as moved by his grandfather's fierceness and depth as much as any particular aspect of his practice or belief. And I don't remember him saying this directly, but the masculine aspect of belief embodied in his grandfather's example was important to the young man trying to make sense of his life, especially in the environment of suffering and pain that he was so intimately acquainted with. So J.D. grew up in an environment in which the regular language of belief and its substance were present, and he's insistent we understand that this was important for him. We can dismiss it as the holdover from a previous age in which there was a kind of penumbra of religion that everyone agreed was important, whatever it might have been, but it was mostly cultural and therefore weak and wispy. But having the language for it, as well as being fluent in some of its consequences, was some measure of a foundation to be built upon. You might not call it bedrock, but it wasn't just sand either. He grew up with some notion of what the life of faith entails. In his developmental years, he became intermittently involved in Christian youth groups and mission activities. This went along with his family's staccato involvement in different churches. As J.D. describes it, they'd latch on to a particular pastor or some initiative in a church and then follow it for a while, but the pastor would move on or be moved on by the congregation, and the connection they felt would break and they'd lapse again. But during those times, there were moments of engagement and the excitement of being a part of going out and getting things done with the various groups that he joined. He had an on-again, off again connection to the life of the church in all measures of expressions and depth of commitment and outlooks on life. He did do some reading and tried to deepen the experiences he was having. C.S. Lewis was part of his study, along with a few other famous, if more shallow, authors, so it wasn't like he was simply swept away from time to time by the occasion, by the occasion of some strong personality or program in the churches that his parents joined. He wanted to know what the faith was and why it had some claim on his life, or at least why the people around him were responding to it. And while he didn't know it at the time, this was also when he was first beginning to fuse his first glimmers of intellectual curiosity with the simmering problems of his life at home. He was searching two of the elements of his life. He was trying to bring them into some measure of intelligibility. One was why his home life was so awful, and the second was what did belief offer in the face of it? It's normal for every person to begin to wonder about the possibilities and the potentials of his life, but these questions are not always pursued with the tenacity necessary to bring the answers together. In his younger self, he couldn't find enough depth in his probing to see if there was a linkage. And so he did what most people do. He simply let the questions set in abeyance while he got busy with other things. It was only later on that he was able to put some flesh on these bare bones and begin to understand the potential that they offered. As he writes the book, he's looking back from the perspective of the answers he found and is offering us a glimpse of the glimpse of the depth of his searching. As we read, we could also become aware of the questions we've let go, or the disconnections in our lives that we've allowed to remain as they are, and then be challenged to pick them up and find some answers for ourselves. If nothing else, this is a book inviting us to think,

Two Doubts That Opened A Door

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not just to believe. And in the midst of his various involvements with the various youth groups and activities offered to him, there were two aspects of his experience that intrigued him. Both of them were considered to be bedrock assumptions among those in the group, but he never found them persuasive or helpful. And it's important for us to note them. They were both gateways to his embrace of Catholicism. The first was that he never really feared death. There was no shortage of it in his childhood. He was surrounded by the hard facts of life from his early days in a family noted for its instability and the concomitant sickness and accidents that result. He didn't grow up in a ghetto, he wasn't surrounded by gang shootouts or tough enforcers, but there was plenty of the dysfunction and drug abuse that led to hard, unhappy, and short lives. But amid the stare of black mortality, he never had a deep fear of dying. I suppose you could make the case that it was a symptom of being disconnected and alienated, and so he never felt enough community with those who were losing their lives to be truly touched by their deaths. At the same time, he wasn't comatose. Dying touches us all, even if it's just a classmate or a distant cousin. It's hard to feel indifferent to it. But in all of this, though, he didn't feel the imperative of getting his life together so as to ward off the prospect of death, since dying wasn't a looming, awful certainty for him. And this was as true, according to him, when he was a marine in Iraq as when he was a kid in Ohio. The cold hands of mortality didn't make his skin crawl. This touched on his capacity to respond to the strategy of evangelical imperatives. You know what I mean. He was surrounded by people who asked the question, where will you go when you die? That question just didn't have very much power for him. He never looked at the sum of his life and began to quake at the prospect of an eternity of punishment and fear. There was no rush on his part to embrace the tendrils of belief to ward off the barrenness of life that ends badly. He doesn't really have an explanation, other than to note it was the case. He just didn't have an awful fear of dying. And the second aspect of his experience was that he never really trusted the simple offer of salvation he and his youth group offered to people in trouble. It was one thing to believe in Jesus and the saving power of the cross. It was another thing to know that saying yes to being saved would change a person's life in a moment for the better. Even if in an affirmation given with all sincerity, and from the bottom of absolute desperation, he'd seen the people in his own family who'd embrace the promise of new life, go back to the bottle or the needle, and entomb their lives in the details of addiction, salvation included. From the earliest experiences he had, he knew it was never enough simply to convince someone or to present them with a formula. Something else was necessary in their lives to realize the changes that would signal true salvation. Looking around, he knew there had to be more to religion and more to the questions about the purpose and possibilities of life than the simple formula he was presented with and that he presented to other people as part of his involvement. It was the something more he kept trying to find. I can't think of any other of anything of any other phrase to decide to describe the ch the search for God at work in our lives better than that one. Something

Death Without Fear And Salvation Skepticism

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more. In his description, he found a preliminary answer to what he was looking for. It's one the Romans had discovered millennia before him, although he didn't know it at the time. Of course, what he discovered was credentials. He found out he could collect the credentials and successes that propelled his life away from the quotidian conundrums that filled it. In the middle of the questions and problems he had, especially amid the betrayals he experienced from his drug-abusing mom and his unreliable stepfather, he found out he was smart enough to succeed. And once he had a taste of where success could lead him, he went all out. If we imagine everyone uses one drug or another to ward off the anxieties and cruelties of life, this quest for the juicy rewards of success was what he injected into his veins. There wasn't anything more powerful or more innovating than that. Not only did he find it pleasurable and fulfilling, more importantly, he found out he was awfully good at it. He enlisted in the Marine Corps and ended up with a cushy and more intellectual specialty. When he got out of the military, he signed up to go to Ohio State, where he glutted himself with classes and projects so that he finished in record time, all successfully. And in the combination of successes he had accumulated for himself, he applied for and was admitted to the apex of credentialdom, Yale Law School. Whatever anxieties or fears there were rumbling through the hallways of his life, he was able to still them by riding the breaking wave of the good life. Even as he got to law school, he knew he'd made it. But he didn't just get to law school, he succeeded. And we should note, his previous book left us at just about that time. He was graduating and setting himself up for the kind of deep accomplishment most people only dream about. He wasn't afraid of worker commitment, he wasn't put off by the demands of high-stress jobs or full-on careers, and he wasn't afraid that his life wouldn't amount to anything. Life had worked out for him, and it was all the more amazing given where he had come from and the obstacles that he had made his way over. He could look back at his life and assess his strengths and weaknesses, as well as understand the deeper truths of his history and background. He knew he had succeeded, but he also knew what it cost so many of the others in his life who didn't succeed. That's what makes Hillbilly elogies so poignant for the rest of us. It's not just the story of the success of the one who'd made it. It's a story that includes the landscape of those who didn't. But as is always the case, there was something missing. At the end of his first book, he hinted that he had found the one, the woman he would marry. She'd come on the scene and was in he was entranced by her. She was the one he wanted to be with. The amazing part about her, for him, was that she wasn't running after the credits and recognition that propelled him. Although she was frighteningly bright, the big prizes seemed to be of no consequence to her. Of course, she'd grown up in a much more secure and prosperous household than he, but her alternative viewpoint, however

Chasing Credentials As A Substitute

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it could be explained, intrigued J.D., especially, and eventually they became a couple. Following the great success of his book, he very seriously sat down to assess where his life was concerning the notoriety and fame he enjoyed. It was then that he began to take the measure of what he wanted his life to become and what was going to become important for him. What had come to him wasn't enough. With all that he had envisioned for himself, he was neither satisfied nor quieted. He was still being gnawed by the something more that infected his silence. Partially, he found it in partnership with his wife. She was a stabilizing influence for him and gave him life and gave his life purpose and meaning, especially when they had their first child. As most of humanity knows, the extension of life's measures as surrounding children wakes everyone up to the importance of the larger questions of meaning and focus. For J.D., they were the reignition of the questions that had laid dormant for a long time, covered over by the pile of plaques and degrees that he had accomplished that he had accumulated, and the disquiet only amplified as he stood looking at the abyss of the days and years he'd lived. This was brought home to him all the more powerfully because of the incredible fame he was enjoying because of his book. He'd become the voice of his generation, especially because the behavior of so many of those in Middle America seemed incomprehensible to the media voices of the time. They reached out to him to deepen the explanations in the examples that he had used in his book, thus making his name and his face into national symbols. For a time he was on the lips of everyone, which, if you're hungry for success and the notice and adulation it brings, is all anyone could hope for. But the giving only famishes the craving, as in T. S. Eliot's words. He knew what he had achieved became hollow to him. He was still hungry for the more in life. So he began to read. Pope Benedict once cautioned impassioned atheists and agnostics to be careful about their faith. It's not easy to sustain their convictions about God's absence in the face of so much evidence and experience. Unless they're careful to avoid any further interference or information, they're likely to run across something that some book or talk or discovery, something that could interfere with everything they believe. It was this way with J.D. He began to read and to talk, and when he did, his religious world began to become larger. First of all, he knew the world of religion was something he had to address in his life. Simply shutting it out was not sufficient. Not paying attention was not enough.

Success, Fame, And The Hollow Feeling

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He had to deal with this ethos in his own life. Plus, he knew it had to do with something more than the brief questions about whether you go when you die or whether you're saved or not. In this vein, he also looked around at those who had also been consumed by the same bug that animated him throughout his life. That is, he looked at those he'd gone to school with and at their high ambitions. And when he realized life had to mean something more than creating an entire army of those who competed and won all the prizes of life in the competitive atmosphere of Yale and environs. And he found the social encyclicals of the Catholic Church to be compelling. Especially the first of them, issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. He found it that it spoke to him and the concerns of his heart. While becoming aware of this of the displacements of the day caused by the changing economic conditions of the turn of the century, that Pope asked people to be aware of the dignity of human life and the clear purpose of economic activity, which is human prospering. The Pope challenged every group at the time, and by extension to all of us, to consider the needs of the entire human family as we structure our world and its activities. And that appealed to JC a great deal. All we do, especially in the forefront of society, has to be oriented to people, not just to the GDP or to the success of corporations or countries. People count first. Reading this and the follow-up contributions of the Church convinced him he needed to take the spiritual life of the church seriously. In his pursuit, he was more moved by history than by theology, which is okay. We can get lost in the details of specialized questions and recondite answers so that they are not very helpful. In truth, all of theology should be as forthright and obvious as rifle calibers are to hunters or socket sets to mechanics.

Catholic Social Teaching Grabs His Mind

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If someone can extrapolate the truths of theology from the story of history, then it means they're doing theology the right way. As long as they remember they're seeking and speaking about the same thing, the search speaks to the same truth. In his reflection, JD seems to have found what they are and that they are important. The life of the church spoke to him and it made a difference. And secondly, he wanted to have a deeper and richer environment for his children to grow up in. The hit and miss environment of his upbringing, especially when it concerned the deeper questions of life, was not sufficient for him. His kids needed a firmer foundation, and there couldn't be one more firm and more certain than the Catholic Church. This was his final conclusion, arrived at only with some trepidation given the anti Catholic bias of his upbringing. He had to bring it to his relatives that he was going over to the other side and join those whom they had form been formed to believe was the enemy of true belief. But he acceded to his heart and joined the Church with full acceptance. And with peace in his heart. Along the way, as his acuteness to these realities was growing, he also began to appreciate the stability of the church. We don't think about this all that much. We're surrounded by how the church is and should be. It doesn't occur to us to think about it being different. But the doctrinal foundations and the teaching of the church offer a stable platform for those who are anxious about responding to the gospel. Rather than depending on the personality of a pastor or the particular teaching of a passing inspiration, the church offers a compilation of dogma and interpretation open to all people all the time. Entrusting his faithful response to the life of the church was good for him, as well as making a solid gift of it to his children. He found himself moved not only by the depth of the church's history, but by the comprehensive nature of her teaching. In this explanation, he does not spend a long time talking about Jesus and salvation. Partly, this is due to his background. He wasn't looking to uncover what he didn't know. He was looking to experience what he had not yet found. Jesus was a real presence for him in his life.

Choosing The Church For His Children

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What he wanted was to find a way to gain greater access to the truth of this presence and its meaning. We have a hint that he has found great meaning in the everyday practice of the life of the church. Going to confession, going to mass, dealing with the kids who don't want to get up early on Sunday, being a part of the Lenten season, circulating as part of the life of the diocese, all these help to sustain his life of faith. They're not groundbreaking, and they're not particularly powerful in description. It's not like hearing a voice in the night or having a vision of Christ come to visit, but they are part of the conversion experience he's had. In fact, they are powerful indicators that he has heard and understood the message of the life of the church. Indeed, I can't think of any greater revelation that he understands what the stakes are than the title of his book. Communion describes what he was seeking and what he found better than any other word. There are some curious aspects of the book. One is his description of his decision to make his life with his wife. As so many couples do, they finished school, then took off for their first jobs, and lived together a year or so as they were planning their wedding. In JD's account, it was simply the matter of fact. He might think differently of his own children were to do the same, but that's for a book farther down the line, I suppose. Another is that his wife seems to be uninterested in following his religious sensibilities. Maybe it's because she's Hindu and is much less interested in the dynamics of belief, or at least in the dynamics as we describe them. I do hope that might change, but in his description, she is supportive of him and his journey, but it is one that seems not to interest her

Stability, Sacraments, And Everyday Practice

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at all. Or maybe he's just protecting her from his story. Finally, his reflections on the meagerness of our religious sensitivities when it comes to everyday concerns are worth pondering. He wrote that we'll tell a businessman to tithe, but we're uncomfortable telling him you ought to pay a living wage, even though it runs throughout Catholic teaching, which is a way to say that there is a tension, even in the church, concerning what the church believes and what it lives. It's a reminder that conversion still lies ahead for all of us all the time. It's a book it's a book worth reading. Our journeys are ours, but we learn a lot from the journeys of others. Take the time to find out what those other journeys might teach you. Back in just a moment. Oh, sure, it remains dark at nighttime in the morning their sun. All the features of what human, of what's human, operate age after age, the foolishness of men appears and prances on stage after stage. But the story changes after a time, is altered and amended. Little known facts are added, surprise endings are appended. So even the best known and most honored among us fade. Their accomplishments are criticized, their firm stances splayed. The bravest man's intolerance comes to be what is known. The wise scholar's diligence transforms him to the dullest drone. Heroes grow into bearded old men or become foolish boys. Business moguls evolve into restless tyrants with expensive toys. And on and on until our stories fade, are but tales on the moor. All held deer

Loose Ends, A Poem, And Farewell

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evaporates, our lives become empty and poor. That we ascertain again the endless facts of all learning. Truth and its companions are the only accolades worth earning. That's in the grand arc of history. I hope that in the weeks to come you can continue to join us here as we experience what it means to be living Catholic.

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Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okr.org.