ROME >> Just six years ago, JD Vance, then an aspiring politician, was baptized in a private chapel in Cincinnati, and local friars celebrated his conversion to Catholicism with a reception with doughnuts.

On Friday, among cardinals in red capes and lace tunics, Vance knelt below the golden vaults of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where he is spending his first Easter week since becoming the vice president of the United States. On Saturday, he met with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state.

No meeting was announced with Pope Francis, who recently left the hospital after spending five weeks there in serious condition and has since made few public appearances.

Vance’s Catholic faith permeates his socially conservative politics. But since he took office, some of the Donald Trump administration’s policies have drawn condemnation from the pope.

Francis has strongly criticized the Trump administration’s policy of mass deportations and has urged Roman Catholics to reject anti-immigrant sentiments. Vance has strongly defended that policy, pointing to the medieval Catholic theological concept of “ordo amoris,” the idea of a hierarchy of duties that prioritizes immediate obligations to one’s family or community over more distant needs.

“You love your family, then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance said in an interview with Fox News in January. “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”

The pope seemed to be alluding to Vance’s argument in a letter he wrote in February to American bishops in which he spoke out against Trump’s policy on migrants.

In the letter, Francis said, “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,” Francis wrote, is “love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Vance acknowledged the pope’s critical comments but said he would continue to express his views.

“I was certainly surprised when he criticized our immigration policy in the way that he has,” Vance said at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in February. He added that the news media, along with social media influencers and even some Catholics, “try to bring the Holy Father into every culture war battle in American politics.”

Still, Vance said that the pope “cares about the flock of Christians” and that he was praying for him.

During Vance’s meeting Saturday with Parolin and with Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s foreign minister, the officials exchanged opinions on “difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners,” along with other issues, according to a statement from the Vatican.

On Friday, Vance stood, sat and knelt for two hours in St. Peter’s Basilica, his young daughter sleeping in his arms at one point, as he followed the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion, during which the faithful are invited to fix their eyes on a statue of the crucified Jesus. Cardinals and bishops proceeded in a line, bent and kissed the statue’s feet.

Kimberlee Woo-leng, 24, a student from Trinidad and Tobago who also attended the service, said she hoped spending Holy Week in Rome would help Vance “have mercy.”

“I hope it strikes his heart,” she said.