Christian or not, the world has felt a resounding impact from the April 21 death of 88-year-old Pope Francis, nearly one month after he was discharged from an extended hospital stay for acute respiratory problems caused by double pneumonia. While his official cause of death has been identified as a cerebral stroke, millions of social media users have pinned the blame on United States Vice President JD Vance, who briefly met with the Pope on Easter Sunday, less than 24 hours before he passed.
Already made to be the laughingstock of the internet on multiple occasions within the last year alone, Vance has been catapulted into the meme-o-sphere yet again due to the suspicious proximity of his visit to the Vatican and the Pope’s death.
The reportedly coincidental overlap (🥴) has birthed thousands of memes that paint Vance — a Catholic convert in adulthood — as the antichrist, the devil, and a corrupted soul that drove the Pope to his demise. Other memes argue that despite his ailments, Pope Francis held on long enough just to tell Vance what a horrible Catholic he was … Either way, it’s an increasingly bad look for the US’s already withered reputation worldwide.
Ahead of his 17-minute drop-in at the Pope’s quarters, Vance initially met with Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Archbishop Paul Gallagher on Holy Saturday for an “exchange of opinions on the international situation … with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners.”
In January, Pope Francis publicly called President Trump’s aggressive plan to crack down on illegal immigration a “disgrace.” He followed up with a more detailed letter about a week before his 38-day hospitalization, outlining how the Trump administration’s targeting and deportation of migrants and refugees facing dire situations in their homelands “damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.”
In the letter, the Holy Father directly discredited Vance’s individualistic invocation of ordo amoris, a Medieval Catholic ideology which delineates a hierarchy of love, in order to justify prioritizing American citizens ahead of immigrants.
“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’, that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” the Pope wrote on February 10.
Pope Francis delivered his final address on Easter Sunday, minutes after the brief meeting with Vance, and underscored compassion for the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants, as well as liberation of prisoners of war and political prisoners. Netizens have interpreted the speech as the Pope’s final word against Vance and the broader Trump administration’s policies — especially considering his terseness in the US Vice President’s presence.
Needless to say, Vance may have thought that the fabricated story of intercourse with a couch was once his biggest problem — but this is a stain that can never wash clean, coincidence or not.
So — do we have a trophy-dropping, Pope-killing, demonic couch-violator as a Vice President, or was Pope Francis just a physically fragile 88-year-old man on the brink after a severe health crisis earlier this year? Looking through the content that has emerged in the last day, social media users really do put up a convincing argument for the former.
