Vance is (presently) Catholic. It wasn’t that long ago that the Catholics were the Scary Bad Guys in the US, immigrating and endangering the views of reasonable, sensible Protestants, and the politicians were off leveraging fears of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaine_Amendment

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/American_river_Ganges_crop.jpg

“The American River Ganges”, a 1871 political cartoon by Thomas Nast from Harper’s Weekly, depicting Catholic bishops as foreign crocodiles preying on U.S. children, illustrating the fear behind the proposed Blaine Amendment

The Blaine Amendment was a failed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have prohibited direct government aid to educational institutions that have a religious affiliation. Most state constitutions already had such provisions, and thirty-eight of the fifty states have clauses that prohibit taxpayer funding of religious entities in their state constitutions.

The measures were designed to deny government aid to parochial schools, especially those operated by the Catholic Church in locations with large immigrant populations.[1] They emerged from a growing consensus among 19th-century U.S. Protestants that public education must be free from "sectarian’ or "denominational’ control, while it also reflected nativist tendencies hostile to immigrants.[2]

https://www.oursundayvisitor.com/catholicism-and-the-revisited-history-of-the-ku-klux-klan/

When most of us think of the Klan, we are thinking of it as an organization with a thru-line all the way back to 1865, but the truth is that the first iteration of the KKK was short-lived. Historian David Chalmers explains that it began as group of former Confederate soldiers who amused themselves by pretending to be ghosts with silly titles before evolving into something far more terrible when they realized their antics scared recently freed Blacks. It ultimately became a terrorist group intended to restore white supremacy in the South before being put down by President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration and the military in 1872.

On Thanksgiving Day 1915, William J. Simmons founded the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia. This former preacher turned salesman resurrected the ideals and methodology of the first Klan and combined them with made-up imagery from D.W. Griffith’s recent blockbuster film, “The Birth of a Nation,” which valorized them. When Simmons observed the nationwide tension over the question of immigration, he saw an opportunity for his organization ripe for the taking.

Americans’ concerns about immigration had grown as two massive waves of Catholic immigrants arrived in the United States over a period of 80 years, beginning in the 1840s. As Josh Zietz writes, “Until the 1920s, America’s doors were open to European immigrants, as long as they qualified under a statute passed in 1790 that reserved naturalized citizenship for ‘free white persons.'” The first wave consisted of Irish and German immigrants who swelled the ranks of Catholics in the United States by the millions prior to the Civil War. The second wave came between 1890 and 1924 and was even bigger, with most of the new arrivals coming from southern and eastern Europe and settling in eastern and midwestern cities.

Immigrants did not necessarily come to America with the aim of changing American culture (they came for simpler reasons), but change it they did. Most Americans believed their country was a white, English-speaking, Protestant country whose way of life was rooted in agrarian rhythms. This new wave of immigrants was mostly Catholic and Jewish, the majority did not speak English, had customs and loyalties that seemed odd, and made cities politically powerful at the expense of rural areas. Consequently, religious, ethnic and political tensions were combined into anti-Catholic sentiment. Senator Ira Hersey of Maine was hardly unique in complaining in 1924 that “we have thrown open wide our gates and through them have come other alien races, of alien blood, from Asia and southern Europe … with their strange and pagan rites, their babble of tongues.” His implication was clear: These people, including Catholics, could not be good Americans.