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“Did you talk to the pope at all in the last few months?”

Ross Douthat put the question to JD Vance near the end of a wide-ranging interview published Thursday by the New York Times.

Vance dodged at first — invoking his respect for the pope, reaching back to Pope Francis — until Douthat cut in: “You’re not answering my question.”

Then he gave it up. “Have I spoken to the pope in the last few months? Yes.”

He described what he called a “positive relationship” with Leo, waved off Douthat’s suggestion that he was “secretly on team peace,” and refused to say anything more, citing a rule against discussing private conversations.

That was the one piece of real news in an hour of practiced evasion. By Thursday afternoon, questions about the encounter began to emerge.

Through my own reporting, I can find no record of that call.

Two independent Vatican sources with intimate knowledge of the Church’s diplomatic relationships told me they were unaware of any such conversation and are skeptical it happened. Neither the official Vatican spokespersons nor the vice president’s team responded on the record by publication time.

It is very possible the two men did speak. If they did, the conversation happened outside the normal channels of Vatican diplomacy — the protocol that ordinarily produces a record. Either way, the call has left no trace on either side of the Atlantic.

The silence is what makes it strange. The alleged contact would have landed in the same stretch when Trump and Vance were publicly criticizing Pope Leo over his opposition to the war with Iran.

When this pope speaks with a head of state, the world finds out. The Vatican put out a readout when Leo phoned Canada’s Mark Carney, and it confirmed his calls with Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron, and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum.

A conversation with the Catholic vice president of the United States, during an open rupture over war, is usually the kind of call Rome documents. We heard about this one only because Vance mentioned it to a columnist.

So the questions arrive, and none of them seem to resolve in his favor. Here’s what I mean.