In a very seventeenth-century-coded turn of events, the pope circulated a letter among the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops rebuking (though without naming) the vice president over his misguided use of the theological concept of ordo amoris, the “order of loves.” J. D. Vance, in a Fox News interview in January, described an “old school … very Christian concept” that “you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus [on] and prioritize the rest of the world.” This ostensibly Christian ordering of loves contrasts with “the far left,” who “hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders.”
In his letter, Pope Francis attacked the idea that Christian love is “a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extends to other persons and groups.” Instead, for Francis, Christian theology describes the human subject as constituted by its “relationship with all, especially with the poorest … without exception.”
I think Francis is right, but it’s worth pointing out that all of this chatter about the ordo amoris is a smokescreen. Vance was not speaking in that Fox News interview as a faithful Catholic wrestling with how to navigate competing moral obligations. He was speaking as the second-in-command of an administration that swept to power promising to enact “the largest deportation operation in American history.”
