John Yep on His Decades-Long Friendship With Charlie Kirk
Showing 7 John Yep videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.
John Yep, president of Catholics for Catholics and a childhood friend of Charlie Kirk's from their shared hometown of Lamont, Illinois, gave one of the more personal accounts of Kirk's faith life after reconnecting with him in Phoenix in 2022. Yep described Kirk directly asking him to connect him with a Catholic priest, a relationship that grew close enough that the same priest later became a genuine source of strength for the Kirk family after Charlie's death. Their friendship included regular exchanges of scripture and, according to Yep, private conversations about Catholicism that some later commentators have connected to broader, separately reported claims about Kirk privately reconsidering his public positions on Israel in his final months, a claim that rests on secondhand accounts from Yep and others rather than anything Kirk stated publicly himself. Yep also joined Kirk for a live discussion during the 2025 papal conclave, sharing his hopes for a doctrinally traditional successor to Pope Francis.