Somehow amidst his presumably demanding duties as vice president, J. D. Vance also found time to spark an intra-Catholic debate over the meaning of ordo amoris, or “rightly ordered love,” a phrase that appears in Augustine’s City of God as well as Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. (It also appears indirectly in Dante’s Inferno, as the poet orders the circles of Hell according to inverse gradations of sin, or misdirected love.) As Catholic commentators like America’s James Martin, NCR’s Michael Sean Winters, the Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig, the New Yorker’s Paul Elie, and Commonweal contributor Massimo Faggioli have all pointed out, the Catholic vice president’s temerity in suggesting that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has some nefarious financial stake in defending migrants is matched only by his superficial understanding not just of Catholic social teaching, but of the medieval scholastic tradition he invokes in defense of his ethno-nationalist ideology.
So it was refreshing to read Pope Francis’s brief, pointed letter to the American bishops earlier this week. Noting that he has followed the “major crisis” growing in the United States as a result of the Trump administration’s “initiation of a program of mass deportations,” the pope goes on to defend the fundamental human rights of migrants and explicitly corrects Vance’s flawed understanding of Catholic theology: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups… The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan.’” Amen.
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