We might never quite know what Pope Francis said to the US vice-president during their very brief meeting on Sunday. In the widely shared video clip, it was hardly audible. The morning after, Francis died, and Vance jetted to visit India, finding time to tweet that his heart went out to the millions of Christians who loved Francis (implying, I suppose, that not all Catholics loved him) and patronizing the dead pontiff by calling one of his homilies “really quite beautiful”).

Francis had been as outspoken as could be without naming names, when he criticized Vance in his February letter to US bishops; but he was not just registering his rebuke of Trump and Vance’s cruel treatment of refugees and migrants; he was reacting to a broader trend of instrumentalizing religion for nationalist and authoritarian populism.

In February, Vance had an online “close-quarters street fight” with Rory Stewart, the former UK Conservative minister, diplomat and now professor in the practice of grand strategy at the very university from which Vance obtained his law degree. At issue was what to most of us wouldn’t seem an obvious source of social media outrage: the correct reading of St Augustine’s notion of ordo amoris, the right ordering of love.

In January, Vance had alluded to the concept in an

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