With Pope’s death, the Church faces a sharp split in its future. Vance wants a say in it

LONDON – There is a certain irony in the fact that the last foreign leader Pope Francis received, before

his passing,

for an audience was US Vice-President J.D. Vance.

The

meeting between the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide and the US politician

who converted to Catholicism embodies the deep theological division now splitting the Catholic Church, between a progressive, more humanistic and global approach promoted by the late Pope and the politically conservative view espoused by Mr Vance and many far-right US leaders.