Vice President JD Vance presented Pope Leo XIV with a Bears jersey on Monday, and the Chicago-area native seemed to like it.
“Good choice,” he told Vance.
In a Vatican meeting that lasted approximately 40 minutes Monday morning, Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, presented the new pope with the jersey and a letter from President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump.
Emblazoned on the back of the navy jersey: “Pope Leo XIV.”
The vice president explained that the letter was an invitation to come to America, to which the pontiff nodded politely.
Vance is seen on a video of the visit, widely circulated among Italian media, pointing to his son Ewan Vance’s signature scrawled on the jersey.
The pope presented the Vances with a bronze sculpture engraved with the words, written in Italian, “The peace is a fragile flower.”
The Chicago native has made peace a hallmark of his fledgling papacy.
“You can probably imagine that people in the United States are extremely excited about you,” the vice president said.
The meeting ended with the vice president saying he would pray for the pope and with the pope replying, “I am sure we will meet again.”
It’s the vice president’s second meeting with a head of the Catholic Church in about a month. Vance met pope Francis at the Vatican on Easter Sunday, the day before he died.
Bears coach Ben Johnson joked earlier this month that he’d “heard rumblings” the pope was a fan of his hometown team.
The pope, who was elected earlier this month, was born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago and is an avowed White Sox fan. He and friend Ed Schmit even attended a White Sox World Series game in 2005, when the future pope was captured wearing a pinstriped jersey and checking his cell phone.