(RNS) — Vice President JD Vance apologized to Cardinal Timothy Dolan for his accusations that Catholic bishops expressed concerns about immigration issues because they were motivated by money, the cardinal said in an interview on EWTN, a large Catholic television network, released Thursday (Feb. 19).
“He and I had a little tête-à-tête, you probably know, when he suggested that bishops in the United States were pro-immigrant because we were making money, which I said was not only untrue, it was scurrilous. And he apologized. All right? He says that was out of line, and that’s not true,” Dolan, who retired as archbishop of New York in December, told Mark Irons in an interview on “EWTN News In Depth” that touched on many political topics.
Vance, a Catholic, made the comments about the bishops’ “bottom line” in his first television interview after becoming vice president when he was asked by CBS’ Margaret Brennan about bishops’ concerns over an executive order lifting restrictions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on schools and houses of worship, signed by President Donald Trump early in 2025.
“I think that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” Vance said.
In 2024, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops received more than $180 million dollars in federal government contracts for programs assisting refugees and unaccompanied migrant children. Refugees enter the U.S. legally after being vetted by the federal government. Until recently in the past year, refugees were not typically the targets of immigration enforcement agencies.
U.S. bishops have repeatedly said they spend more on their work with refugees than they receive. In 2024, they spent more than $179 million on those programs, while in 2023, they spent upward of $130 million, almost $1 million more than they received in government grants.
Despite publicly defending their history of working with refugees, in April 2025, the conference announced they would not seek to renew their agreements with the federal government to support refugees and unaccompanied minors.
The announcement came after months of uncertainty over whether the federal government would reimburse refugee agencies for their work, even though a federal judge formally blocked the administration’s suspension of the refugee resettlement program.
Despite Dolan’s condemnation of Vance’s comments, he told Irons in the EWTN interview that Vance is “a very good guy. I enjoy him a lot. I agree with a bunch of stuff that he talks about.”
Dolan said he and Vance find agreement when the vice president speaks about family, babies, patriotism and “the beauty of what the United States stands for,” but they also don’t agree on Ukraine.
Of politicians, Dolan said, “You’re not going to get anybody batting a thousand,” making an analogy to baseball, where even legendary players only get a hit about a third of the time they’re at bat.
The cardinal used the same analogy when talking about New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim. “If a politician gets a C+, it ain’t bad,” he said of Mamdani. (He declined to give Vance a letter grade.)
“I’m afraid he would be an avowed, a Democrat, meaning he’s not pro-life, right? You worry, is he going to protect religious liberty? You worry if he’s going to protect the dignity and the definition of the family,” said Dolan.
But the cardinal said, “We may have some other areas where we’re saying ‘hey, not bad,’ such as openness to the immigrant, his desire for fair housing, his earnest desire to increase the income and the prosperity of most of the people in this town.”
Dolan said he was “ticked off” that Mamdani hadn’t invited Dolan to his inauguration, that Mamdani didn’t attend Archbishop Ronald Hicks’ installation nor have many Catholics on his transition team.
Of Hicks, his successor, Dolan said, “What a gem he is.”
The cardinal said he had asked Mamdani “point blank” why he was a socialist, saying a socialist is defined by supporting “government ownership of the means of production.”
Dolan said Mamdani replied, “I’m not that. I’m an economic socialist in that I want greater distribution of the wealth.” Dolan said, “Well, who doesn’t?”
Mamdani is a democratic socialist. The Democratic Socialists of America say their vision “pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history,” opposes capitalism and works to build “a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.”
Dolan has been considered a favorite of Trump, who said Dolan should be pope in the leadup to the 2025 conclave, and he sits on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission.
“I’m very happy with the administration that takes religious freedom very seriously,” Dolan told Irons.
But Dolan said he was “upset” with the Trump administration for not taking greater efforts to restrict access to pills that can be used for abortions and for its approach to immigration enforcement.
Pills used for abortion are bad, said Dolan, because “it kind of strengthens the opinion that pregnancy is a disease — that a baby in the womb is someone to get rid of if it happens to be inconvenient or untimely.”
Dolan said he and the Rev. Franklin Graham became very worried “when ICE started going into churches and harassing churches.”
The cardinal said “ICE would show up on Sunday Mass just in trucks and cars, and the people wouldn’t come.”
“This is a violation of religious freedom,” Dolan said. “People have the right to worship on the Sabbath.”
Dolan said he and Graham spoke with the director of ICE in New York, who committed to stop those actions. “I have yet to hear of any other pastor since then tell me they’re harassing or outside the churches,” said Dolan.
In the interview, Dolan condemned New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who is Catholic, for supporting legislation legalizing medically assisted suicide for terminally ill people, and he decried the University of Notre Dame’s appointment of Susan Ostermann, who has publicly supported abortion rights, to direct the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies.
Dolan also spoke about this year’s 250th anniversary of the U.S. and celebrated that Catholics had grown from a small minority at the country’s founding to a major presence in the population and in public life.
Saying “Catholic values and American values are very similar,” he named the Bible, prayer, faith, religious freedom, “one nation under God,” the family, the principle of subsidiarity or local decision-making, democracy and the “drive to protect the common good” as examples.
“Those are Catholic values. Those are American values,” he said.
