JD Vance got a Vatican reality check Saturday as Pope Francis skipped their meeting — and sent his top deputy to lecture the vice president on compassion.

While Vance attended a Good Friday service with his family and met privately with Pope Francis later, the formal sit-down was handled by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who delivered the Pope’s clear message: stop justifying cruelty with religion.

Trump’s brutal deportation policies are so extreme, even the Pope is keeping his distance — and Vance is stuck defending the indefensible.

The Vatican described an “exchange of opinions” focused on war, humanitarian crises, and especially “migrants, refugees, and prisoners.”

That’s diplomatic code for: stop throwing vulnerable people out of the country.

The White House, trying to clean it up, framed the visit as a warm conversation about shared faith and global peace — a striking departure from the Vatican’s pointed language.

Francis didn’t name Vance in his February letter to U.S. bishops, but the criticism was unmistakable. He blasted mass deportations as a “grave sin” that violates the dignity of families and contradicts the teachings of Christ.

Vance — a Catholic convert — previously tried to defend Trump’s policies using “ordo amoris,” or the “order of love,” claiming Americans come first.

Francis rejected that logic outright: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests,” he wrote, but a love that includes everyone, without exception.

Vance attacked the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in January, accusing them of profiting off immigrant resettlement — a claim Cardinal Timothy Dolan called “scurrilous” and “nasty.”