Not long before Pope Francis passed away Monday, he met with Vice President JD Vance and lectured him about immigrants.

The 88-year-old pontiff seemed to initially snub Vance over the weekend, having his deputy Cardinal Pietro Parolin and the Vatican Foreign Minister Archbishop Paul Gallagher meet with Vance on Saturday. The Vatican described that meeting as “an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners.

“Finally, hope was expressed for serene collaboration between the state and the Catholic Church in the United States, whose valuable service to the most vulnerable people was acknowledged,” the statement from the Vatican added.

Vance’s office issued its own statement, saying that the group discussed “the plight of persecuted Christian communities around the world” and Donald Trump’s “commitment to restoring world peace”—making no mention of immigrants, refugees, or prisoners.

On Sunday, Vance met with Francis in a brief meeting, telling the pontiff, “It’s good to see you in better health,” and accepting Easter eggs for his children. But the Pope’s official Easter sermon that day criticized hostility toward immigrants and international aid, a trademark of the Trump administration.

“How much contempt is stirred up at times toward the vulnerable, the marginalized and migrants?” Francis said in his address.

Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, has provoked tensions with the church with his defense of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and even attacked the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in January for assisting immigrants, saying their concerns about the Trump administration were due to the fear of losing federal funding.

“Are they worried about humanitarian concerns, or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” Vance said at the time.

Vance further drew the ire of the Vatican when he invoked the Catholic concept of “ordo amoris”—the order of love—to defend the White House’s mass deportation policies, claiming in January that the well-being of Americans trumped any concern for that of immigrants.

Francis, the first and so far only Latin American pope, responded with a letter saying, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.

“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 February letter stated, pointedly criticizing mass deportation.

Francis more explicitly condemned Trump’s mass deportations on an Italian talk show that month, saying, “If true, this will be a disgrace.… This is not the way to solve things.”

Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top officials were exposed for using encrypted messaging app Signal to discuss sensitive information regarding an attack on Yemen—a significant breach of security. Now it’s been reported that Hegseth shared similar information in a second Signal chat, this time with his wife and brother present in said chat.

His response to this second national security bombshell has been to insist that it’s simply a politically motivated smear campaign rather than yet another massive faux pas.

“Your agenda is illegals, trans & DEI—all of which are no longer allowed @ DoD,” Hegseth wrote late Sunday night, in response to the Democratic Party’s X account saying he “needs to go.”

A longer statement from the Department of Defense also downplayed the national security concerns of Hegseth’s actions.

“The Trump-hating media continues to be obsessed with destroying anyone committed to President Trump’s agenda. This time, the New York Times—and all other Fake News that repeat their garbage—are enthusiastically taking the grievances of disgruntled former employees as the sole sources for their article. They relied only on the words of people who were fired this week and appear to have a motive to sabotage the Secretary and the President’s agenda,” wrote Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell. “There was no classified information in any Signal chat, no matter how many ways they try to write the story. What is true is that the Office of the Secretary of Defense is continuing to become stronger and more efficient in executing President Trump’s agenda.”

Hegseth doubled down again Monday at the White House Easter Egg roll, of all places.

“What a big surprise that a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax; that won’t give back their Pulitzers—they got Pulitzers for a bunch of lies,” he told CSPAN reporters on Monday morning, while Easter festivities went on behind him. “This is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees, and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations.”

While the first Signal chat was created by national security adviser Mike Waltz, the second one was created solely by Hegseth.

“Every day he stays in his job is another day our troops’ lives are endangered by his singular stupidity,” Senator Tammy Duckworth commented.

This story has been updated.

Senator Chris Van Hollen set the record straight Friday on the shameless lies about his meeting with the Maryland man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. 

During a press conference, Van Hollen put to rest right-wing rumors started by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who claimed that Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia were “sipping margaritas” and shared a photo on X of the two men at a table with drinks topped with maraschino cherries. 

The Maryland Democrat said that when they sat down to talk at his hotel, “one of the government people came over and deposited two other glasses on the table with ice, and I don’t know if it was salt or sugar around the top, but they looked like margaritas.”

“If you look at the one they put in front of Kilmar, it actually had a little less liquid than the one in front of me, to try to make it look, I assume, like he drank out of it,” Van Hollen said.  

“Let me just be very clear, neither of us touched the drinks that were in front of us. And if you want to play a little Sherlock Holmes, I’ll tell you how you could know that,” he........

© New Republic