THE US Vice-President, J. D. Vance, was in the Cotswolds over the summer — and in the news. A lot was written about him in the media, but one significant matter which has not been much commented on is a row with the late Pope — among others. It was sparked by something that Mr Vance said earlier in the year.
“As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens,” he said. “It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders.
“But there’s this old-school [concept] — and I think a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world. A lot of the far Left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.”
Among the first to object was the former Cabinet minister Rory Stewart, who, writing on X, criticised Mr Vance’s comments as a “bizarre take on John 15.12-13”, and as “less Christian and more pagan tribal” (Comment, 7 February). In reply, Vance wrote simply: “Just google ordo amoris.”
He continued: “Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?”
If you’re not familiar with the term (and I’m not convinced Mr Vance was when he first made his comments about an “old-school concept”), St Augustine uses the term ordo amoris, often translated as “rightly ordered love”, in his classic work City of God, as a definition of virtue. St Thomas Aquinas expanded on St Augustine’s work in the Summa Theologica, arguing that there must be “some order in things loved out of charity . . . in reference to the first principle of that love, which is God”.
St Aquinas argued that this “order of charity”, or ordo caritatis, is a principle that should dictate how we are called to love God, ourselves, and our neighbours, in a hierarchical and interconnected manner. He referred to Augustine to argue that, while one should love all people equally, one ought “chiefly” to consider those who are more closely united by reason of place, time, or other circumstance.
SO, MR VANCE had two of the greatest theologians of all time on his side. What was the problem? It was that he was using the principle of ordo amoris to justify the Trump Administration’s approach to migrants, as indicated by his reference to “people outside their own borders”.
As a result, perhaps unsurprisingly, Pope Francis waded in. In a letter to the US bishops on the topic of migration, the Pope wrote that “an authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized,” which, he said, “does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration”. He continued, however: “This development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others.
“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words, the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings. The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’, that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
WHO is right? The indications are that Pope Leo XIV agrees with his predecessor: he quoted the above approvingly.
To complicate the issue, the moral theologian Oliver O’Donovan suggested some time ago that, although there are some societies in which the rebuke of the parable of the Good Samaritan “strikes like a meteor against the complacency of racial or class self-love . . . in the Western world at large there is probably more danger of our taking the parable complacently as an endorsement of our own characteristic universalism. The universalist claim of every human being upon every other is, after all, more a critical principle than a substantial one. To love everybody in the world is to love nobody very much.”
He suggests that, in a society in which structures have been safeguarded against unjust preferences, a universalist approach demands nothing more than being on guard against the re-emergence of such unjust preferences.
On the other hand, as far as the Good Samaritan is concerned, “far from denying the significance of proximate relations, the parable discovers them where they are not looked for, nearer to us, not further away, under our very noses.” As it does so, “the parable does not endorse our current forms of Western universalism but calls them into question. It challenges us not to ignore that which is nearest to us, not to let the place where we are become neutralised into a mere passage that excludes neighbourly encounter.”
Question for the week: Wherein lies the truth?
Dr John Inge is a former Bishop of Worcester, and an honorary assistant bishop in the diocese of Salisbury.
