Takeaways from JD Vance’s new book, ‘Communion’

By Steve Contorno, CNN

(CNN) — Hitting bookshelves Tuesday is the follow-up from one of the country’s highest-profile authors, whose debut spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list and inspired a Ron Howard-directed Netflix movie nominated for two Academy Awards.

Introducing “Communion” by Vice President JD Vance.

The book, which chronicles Vance’s conversion to Catholicism, lands at a notable moment — for American Catholics, with a Chicago-born pope presiding over a resurgence of interest in the faith, and for Vance, who soon faces a consequential decision about his political future. It arrives, too, as Vance has emerged as a leading negotiator in the Trump administration’s agreement to end its war with Iran, and he’s now tasked with selling both this deal and his book. To that end, Vance is scheduled to appear on ABC’s The View in the midst of multiple other media interviews focused on Iran.

Vance had ample material for a second book: his pivot from author to politics, behind-the-scenes of the 2024 presidential campaign, previously unreported details from his first year inside the White House and clues about whether he will seek in the presidency in 2028. He delivers little of it. Instead of the score-settling and palace intrigue sometimes infused in political memoirs (and within President Donald Trump’s orbit), “Communion” is a deeply personal account in the mold of “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance’s best-selling memoir, centered mostly on his faith journey in the years surrounding his rise to literary fame.

Here are four takeaways from the book.

Vance regrets making fun of ‘childless cat ladies’

Though he largely avoids relitigating the 2024 election in “Communion,” Vance does use the book to clean up one of his most controversial statements: his critique of “childless cat ladies.”

Vance first made the remark in 2021 while running for US Senate in Ohio, claiming such women were “miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” It became a lightning rod for Democrats during the 2024 campaign, and Vance said he now regrets it. In “Communion,” he called the comment “one of the dumbest things I ever said,” “boneheaded” and a distraction from his actual point: that American society has grown “pathologically hostile to having kids.”

It’s a reversal from how Vance responded to the firestorm that emerged when the comment first resurfaced shortly after becoming Trump’s running mate. Then, a defiant Vance told NBC’s Meet the Press: “I have a lot of regrets, but making a joke three years ago is not at the top 10 of the list.”

Later that year, as the election approached, he admitted in a New York Times interview that the comment was “dumb” and that he wished he had “said it differently.”

In “Communion,” Vance wrote he has since learned a lesson as a Christian statesman: “It’s ok to admit error.”

Vance versus the Vatican

Trump’s immigration crackdowns have repeatedly drawn rebukes from religious leaders, at times putting Vance – the country’s most powerful elected Catholic – in between the president and the pope.

That tension is at the heart of one of the few episodes from Vance’s time as vice president that makes it into “Communion”: His April 2025 visit to the Vatican.

Coming into the trip, Pope Francis had criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policy and had refuted Vance for citing a medieval theological concept called “ordo amoris” to defend the administration’s aggressive tactics.

But when he met with church leaders in Rome to discuss Trump’s policies, Vance found the conversation “unsettling.” Not because they were harsh in their criticism, he wrote, but because they weren’t direct enough in their critique.

Vance claimed the diplomats he spoke with “never specified” which Trump immigration policies they objected to.

“Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes,” he wrote. Later, he added: “I was struck that one of the few institutions with the moral authority and global perspective to address the migration question seemed so afraid of saying something controversial that it chose, effectively, to say nothing at all.”

Vance went on to detail his Easter morning visit with Pope Francis, who was gravely sick but asked to meet with the vice president after canceling earlier in the week. The meeting, he wrote, lasted about 10 minutes. Vance would ultimately become one of the final public visitors before Francis died less than 24 hours later.

“We had different jobs, and I preferred his specific exhortations to the vagueness I had encountered during our Vatican meeting,” Vance wrote. “Better to have an honest conversation than one masked by clichés.”

A new GOP path on abortion

The first Republican administration since the fall of Roe v. Wade has, at times, frustrated some conservative activists who expected the GOP to wield its majority to further curb abortions in the United States. Trump, though, has largely avoided the topic leading up to the midterms, standing by his campaign pledge to let states decide how to regulate pregnancies.

Vance offers a third approach, centered on improving conditions for mothers, children and families in ways that he hopes would lead to fewer women believing they needed to end a pregnancy.

“When having babies is a drag on economic activity, the economic gods favor terminating pregnancies,” Vance writes. “And of course, it’s not just the act of having children that we ought to be concerned about: It’s spending time with them as well.”

Vance points to the successful 2023 Ohio ballot referendum that enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution – which he opposed – as a lesson for Republicans. Its passage in a reliably red state, he argues, should illuminate Republicans to the fact women will reject attempts to eliminate “the last option they thought they had left.”

“That’s why we lost the Ohio referendum, but it’s also how we’ll start winning people over: by reflecting Christian charity in the way we champion the unborn.”

It’s as close to a governing blueprint as the book offers. Vance argues that leaders should focus on the policies that uplift families over gross domestic product and stop viewing humans as cogs in an economy – a vision he connects directly with his Catholic faith.

“To me, Christians cared about abortion (bad) and marriage (good), but their politics seemed so disconnected from the real lives of most people,” he wrote. “But if what brought me back to my faith was the sense that the Church answered life’s big questions, then I must resist the effort to confine Christ’s moral teachings to a few social issues. What would a Christian approach not just to marriage and family, but to economics in the modern era look like?”

The second lady’s leading role

Vance’s book makes clear few people are more central to his story, or his political future, than his wife Usha.

In the acknowledgements of “Communion,” Vance credits Usha, who is Hindu, for encouraging him to reconnect with Christianity after spending a period as an atheist.

“There is at least a little irony in the fact that my non-Christian wife helped lead me back to my own Christian faith, and then made it possible for me to discuss the journey on paper,” he wrote.

In promoting the book, Vance has also said his wife is his first – and harshest – editor (“She doesn’t sugarcoat things,” he told NBC) and will help him decide whether to mount a campaign for president, a decision he recently told CBS will wait until after the midterm elections.

Her faith has at times generated attention, like when Vance told a college audience that he hoped his wife would convert to Christianity. He later clarified on social media that Usha Vance had “no plans to convert” but added, “like many people in an interfaith marriage – or any interfaith relationship – I hope she may one day see things as I do.”

Vance earlier this month told Fox News that the couple decided to raise their kids Catholic, though the kids can decide when they want to be baptized. Two have, one has not, he said.

Soon, a fourth child will make that choice. The second family is expecting a baby this summer.

Vance wrote in his book that he and his wife were reticent to have another kid. He credited the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk, a close friend, for changing their outlook.

“As my wife held Charlie Kirk’s widow on the first day of her terrible sorrow, Erika told Usha between sobs that she regretted having only two kids with Charlie,” Vance wrote, before adding: “Something changed for Usha, and not long after we buried my friend, she became pregnant with our fourth child, a boy. One life was stolen from us, but another was given.”

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