Before he was J.D. Vance, he was James David Hamel. Before that, James Donald Bowman. The name he carries today he chose himself in 2013 — months before graduating Yale, crafting an identity as carefully as any political brand.
And a name, as it turns out, was not the only part of his identity that J.D. Vance was willing to shed. In 2019, the former atheist was baptized into the Catholic Church at a Dominican priory in Cincinnati named St. Gertrude’s.
By the time J.D. Vance arrived on the national stage, very little of the original remained. Peter Thiel gave Vance a job, a philosophy, and millions of dollars.
The Catholic Church gave him a name — Augustine — and a priest to baptize him. What both had in common, it turns out, was something older and powerful, a personal prelature of the Catholic church known as Opus Dei, and a very specific vision for the future of America.
Though not a Catholic himself, Thiel became a firm believer in the system after coming under the influence of his Stanford professor René Girard. When Girard died, the torch passed — from mentor to mentee — and Thiel stepped into the role. Vance would be next
By 2018, Vance had relocated to Cincinnati, joining Revolution LLC as a partner. He had Thiel’s philosophy, Thiel’s network, and soon, Thiel’s money. What he didn’t yet have was a God.
One would soon be arranged for him.
THE BEGINNING OF THE CONVERSION
In 2016, Vance was interviewed by Rod Dreher about his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
Note: This is A memoir that would not exist without Amy Chua, the Yale Law professor who took Vance under her wing and pushed him to write it. Chua introduced him to her own literary agent and who Vance explicitly lists as a mentor in the book. Her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, has deep Federalist Society connections, connections that helped place Vance’s future-wife, Usha, in clerkships under Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts, two of the most powerful conservative judges in the country. Vance also has this couple to thank for something more personal — it was actually Amy who set him up with his future wife.
Peter Thiel has a connection here, too, as Peter Thiel led the Federalist Society chapter at Stanford.
The significance of this will become clear as this article progresses.
But that interview with Rod Dreher revealed something else.
Vance was looking to convert. Rod claims had initially wanted to bring him into the Orthodox faith, but decided Catholicism was the better fit. He then introduced Vance to a Catholic religious figure named Dominic Legge, a Dominican friar — and just like Vance — a Yale Law alumnus. Legge had become a priest at the Dominican House of Studies.
Before joining the order, Legge had clerked for Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and he was the first priest with whom Vance discussed becoming Catholic.
When Vance moved to Cincinnati in 2018, Legge knew exactly who to call: Father Henry Stephan at St. Gertrude Church, a fellow Dominican who had interned for the very same Judge O’Scannlain that Legge had clerked for before taking his vows.
Legge had spent months laying the intellectual groundwork from Washington, and when the moment was right, Vance was handed off to Stephan for the final, intimate work of preparation and baptism.
Two men, shaped by the same judicial mind, positioned on either side of a very important convert. But it goes even deeper than that.
Father Stephan was ordained a priest in May 2018 by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. — just months before Legge would hand Vance off to him in Cincinnati.
In August 2019, Vance was baptized by Father Henry Stephan at St. Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati. He chose St. Augustine as his patron saint. That choice is worth paying attention to. Augustine was not the “love thy neighbor” kind of saint. He believed humans were broken, selfish, and incapable of governing themselves without being forced to.
Augustine’s answer to that problem was power: strong rulers, strong authority, strong control. All in service of getting souls to heaven whether they liked it or not.
Vance actually said that Augustine, “gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way” and that Augestine’s book The City of God was directly relevant to his thinking on policy.
He wasn’t picking a patron saint. He was picking a philosophy.
And yes, the Dolan that ordained the priest months before he baptized Vance, is the very same Dolan who had lobbied against reforming child sex abuse statutes of limitations in Wisconsin and failed to report priests who sexually abused children. He's since retired and now chaplains the NYPD.
These are not insignificant connections. They all thread together. They are all embedded deeply in the same power nexus of an organization known as Opus Dei.
In 2016, Cardinal Dolan handed the parish of St. Agnes in Manhattan to Opus Dei priests, making him one of the most senior American Catholic figures to formally expand the order's institutional footprint in the US.
Legge’s Thomistic Institute received the top honor at the Catholic Information Center’s annual gala in 2024 — the John Paul II New Evangelization Award. For reference, the CIC is Opus Dei’s D.C. headquarters.
And then there’s Peter Thiel — the billionaire who built Vance — and who has been close to Opus Dei since his Stanford days, when the order’s chief American vicar, Father Arne Panula, took him under his wing. It was a friendship that lasted forty years, ending only when Panula died of cancer in July 2017 — at the Catholic Information Center, where his wake was held.
And the deeper you look, the more connections you’ll find.
For example, Hallow is a Catholic prayer app —funded by Thiel funded, and Vance owned Narya Capital — that became the number one app in the Apple Store. At its peak, it directed millions of users to read The Way, the founding text of Opus Dei. Opus Dei cheered them on. Most users had no idea.
To quote George Carlin: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
OPUS DEI
Opus Dei, Latin for “Work of God,” is a Catholic organization with a unique and powerful legal status inside the Church. They call it a “personal prelature,” which basically means they answer to Rome directly and operate outside the normal rules that govern every other Catholic institution on earth.
They are the only organization in the entire Catholic Church with this status.
Since it’s founding in 1928, they do not publish a membership list. Members are actually forbidden from telling people they belong. So when powerful people in Washington, in courtrooms, and in government buildings are members, you simply do not get to know.
Women make up the majority of the membership but have zero governing power. In many of their centers, women are brought in to cook for the men and sent home. That is the role. Permanent servitude.
And it gets worse. As Gareth Gore reported in his book Opus, members have described cult-like recruiting tactics that target teenagers. People have reported being psychologically manipulated, cut off from their families, and controlled down to what they were allowed to read.
In 2024, the Financial Times published an investigation where sixteen women described being forced into what was unpaid domestic servitude.
Four senior Opus Dei priests are currently facing human trafficking charges in Argentina. These are not fringe accusations. These are lawsuits, criminal charges, and on-the-record testimony. And yet, they have judges. They have politicians.
Hell, even convicted FBI spy Robert Hanssen was a member. That’s how deeply they are embedded in America’s government.
The CIC is the same operation disgraced Opus Dei priest C. John McCloskey — a former Wall Street banker turned priest — ran until Opus Dei quietly removed him over a sexual misconduct complaint that costed them $977,000 to settle.
His successor? Arne Panula, an Opus Dei priest who'd been close friends with Peter Thiel since recruiting him at Stanford.
McCloskey’s time at the CIC is worth knowing about. Working out of a small office just across the street from the White House, he personally brought several well-known figures into the Catholic Church, including Newt Gingrich, Senator Sam Brownback, Judge Robert Bork, columnist Robert Novak, and CNBC host Lawrence Kudlow.
In a 2003 interview, he compared his work to sales, saying it was “just like the brokerage business or any business of sales.”
That is what the CIC has always been: a sales floor for the souls of powerful men.
“My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching. That was one of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church. I saw a real overlap between what I would like to see and what the Catholic Church would like to see.” — J.D. Vance, The American Conservative (2019)
THE CATHOLIC INFORMATION CENTER, PROJECT 2025, VANCE, & OPUS DEI
The people behind Project 2025 have direct ties to Opus Dei’s Catholic Information Center (CIC) in Washington, located — quite literally — right across the street from the White House. The CIC is led by an Opus Dei priest, and Opus Dei explicitly rejects the separation of church and state — a bedrock principle of the U.S. Constitution that the organization regards as, at best, beside the point.
Kevin Roberts — the head of the Heritage Foundation — has stated that he goes to the CIC every week for guidance. Guidance that apparently lead to the writing of the Heritage Foundations Project 2025 — the guiding document for the U.S. government now.
When Roberts gave a speech at the CIC in September 2023, the bronze statue of Opus Dei founder Josemaría Escrivá was reportedly covered up before the event.
Per Gareth Gore’s reporting, this was done to avoid embarrassing photos. In the speech itself, Roberts directly quoted Escrivá and called for what he termed “radical incrementalism,” conceding “There simply isn’t the public support — lamentably — right now” for the worldview he is promoting.
Several of Project 2025’s authors — including Roger Severino and Ken Cuccinelli — have been publicly identified as Opus Dei members.
Vance was Heritage's top pick for vice president. He and Roberts are close enough that Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts' book Dawn's Early Light, which was a separate manifesto about dismantling and remaking the federal government.
This isn't new. Back in 2021, before he was a senator, Vance went on a podcast with manosphere influencer Jack Murphy and told Trump exactly what to do if he won again: "Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'"
Vance was, of course, referring to Jackson's defiance of the Supreme Court that led to the Trail of Tears, where thousands of Cherokee people died. And he wasn’t speaking hypothetically. The infrastructure to actually do it was already being built.
In 2021, a young political operative named Saurabh Sharma started an organization called American Moment.
At the 2024 National Conservatism conference Blake Masters stated that the funding came from Peter Thiel and David Sacks, with Vance himself making the introduction. Vance also sat on the group’s advisory board.
Masters, like Vance, is a longtime Thiel protégé — he served as COO of Thiel Capital and president of the Thiel Foundation, and Thiel poured roughly $15 million into his 2022 Senate run, mirroring the $10 million he gave Vance's Ohio campaign that same cycle.
American Moment’s mission, in its own words, is to recruit a “young, ideological, underqualified” group of staffers to fill a future Republican administration.
Today, Sharma works inside the White House as Special Assistant to the President for Personnel. In that role, he plays a major part in deciding who gets hired across the federal government.
His own ethics disclosure shows he holds stock in Palantir — the surveillance company co-founded by Thiel, which is now expanding its contracts with ICE.
The man Vance helped fund is now staffing the executive branch. The man who built him is collecting the contracts.
Now, we know that JD Vance is a follower of Saint Augustine. But guess who else is? The Pope. And somehow, they both read him entirely different.
Leo XIV, elected May 2025, first American pope ever, has spent his entire career on the tradition Vance cosplays on Fox News. So when Vance went on Hannity and twisted ordo amoris, the “order of love,” into a justification for mass deportation (love family, then neighbors, then countrymen, then maybe everyone else), Cardinal Prevost shared an article titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
Pope Francis sent American bishops the same rebuke weeks before he died. Then in April 2026, Vance, now Vice President, told the Pope to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” A sitting VP scolding a sitting pope. That doesn’t happen.
Unless someone tells you to do it.
Enter Peter Thiel, who in March 2026 flew to Rome, confiscated everyone’s phones at a Renaissance palace, and delivered four secret lectures called The Biblical Antichrist.
His thesis: the Antichrist is a “Luddite” who’ll scare humanity into one-world government by stopping AI and tech. His nominees? AI safety researchers, climate activists, Greta Thunberg, and, per leaked recordings, the Pope.
Thiel said out loud he wanted “a lot more” conflict between Vance and Leo XIV. Weeks later, Vance delivered on cue.
At one point, even Peter Thiel admitted he was nervous about Vance getting too close to the Pope — as if worried the relationship might undo the worldview Thiel had spent years shaping in him. It’s very interesting how a Catholic organization is so adamant linked with men who hate the pope.
There’s no membership list with Vance’s name on it. There doesn’t need to be. You can map a man by who built him, funds him, prays for him, and tells him who his enemies are.
As a cradle Catholic, let me assure you, none of the politicians or religious claiming to be Catholic, yet standing by all the blatant crimes against humanity and secret machinations, follow the teachings of the Catholic church I know. Sadly, too many of my faith community have been sucked into ugly politics via the abortion ticket.
Vance was incorrect (again) when he wrote “My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching.” — The American Conservative (2019). Catholic SOCIAL teaching has been framed around the Gospels, Christ’s teachings and humility, and the Jesuits, particularly through their educational institutions. Opus Dei’s focus on control and power is not part of that.