The Vice President of the United States attended this Sunday with his wife and children at a Missa Cantata according to the traditional rite, as revealed by the director of Crisis Magazine, Eric Sammons, who coincided with him at the celebration.
The Vice President of the United States, J.D. Vance, attended a traditional Latin Mass on Sunday morning with his family. This was announced by Eric Sammons, director of the American Catholic magazine Crisis Magazine, through his account on X: “It was nice to see J.D. Vance and his beautiful family at Mass this morning,” he wrote.
Asked by a user whether it was the traditional Mass (TLM), Sammons was brief and precise: “Yes. Missa Cantata,” that is, the sung form of the Mass according to the 1962 missal, celebrated by a single priest with Gregorian chant.
A known pattern
This is not the first time Sammons has reported the Vice President’s presence at his parish. In an episode of his podcast Crisis Point aired last February, dedicated precisely to the figure of Vance, the editor of Crisis explained that both reside in Cincinnati and that the politician “has attended my parish from time to time… because we have traditional Mass,” dating back to his time as senator for Ohio.
Although Sammons did not specify the church on this occasion, everything points to the area of the Oratory of Cincinnati, whose church of Old St. Mary’s —the oldest in the city, in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood— celebrates a traditional sung Mass every Sunday at 9:30 a.m. and is one of the sites designated by the Archdiocese of Cincinnati for the 1962 missal in accordance with the norms of application of Traditionis Custodes.
Deliberate discretion
Vance’s appearance at a neighborhood parish on a Sunday in August is no coincidence. Last June, on the occasion of the publication of his spiritual memoir Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, the Vice President and the Second Lady, Usha Vance, explained in a CBS interview that they try to attend “small churches,” arrive at the exact time, and vary schedules and locations to minimize the inconvenience that the Secret Service detail causes to the rest of the faithful. “You try to take your kids to church, but you also try to do it in a way that doesn’t inconvenience everybody,” Vance noted at the time, who is rarely photographed attending Mass in the Washington area.
Vance, a convert to Catholicism, was baptized and received his first communion in 2019 at the Dominican priory of St. Gertrude in Cincinnati, at the hands of Father Henry Stephan, O.P. He chose Saint Augustine as his patron. His closeness to the traditional liturgy has been noted on repeated occasions: witnesses have described him receiving communion kneeling and on the tongue, and his recurring presence at celebrations according to the ancient rite makes him the highest-ranking public official in the United States linked to the traditional liturgical movement.