Order of love
Vice President JD Vance says everyone who disagrees with him about immigration should Google ordo amoris. That’s pretty good advice. He should take it himself. He might learn how totally he misunderstands it.
Ordor amoris, or “order of love,” is a medieval Catholic concept derived from the works of Saint Augustine.
Vance cites it to justify the cruelty of Trump administration policy on immigration, specifically deportation of suspected violators.
He says: “There is a 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, and then after that prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”
I’m not sure how the “far left” has inverted this order, but as Vance expresses it, what gets inverted are basic Christian understandings of proper human behavior.
Vance says it is “basic common sense” that your moral duty to your children outweighs those “to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away.”
The way Vance tells it, you love your family the most, and others in a series of expanding concentric circles – and by the time you get to the outermost circles, you have no love left for anybody.
Without mentioning Vance, Pope Francis debunked Vance’s interpretation in a letter to U.S. bishops on Tuesday.
He wrote: “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 (Luke 10:25-37) – that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
The idea of an “order of love” comes from St. Augustine, who lived a few hundred years after Christ and is one of the most influential Christian theologians after Saint Paul.
“All men are to be loved equally,” Augustine wrote. “But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.”
That might be a familial connection, but it might be a connection of another kind.
In his book Sources of Strength, Jimmy Carter recalls a conversation with Elroy Cruz, a Puerto Rican pastor he admired. Cruz says: “Señor Jimmy, we need to have only two loves in our lives: for God and for the person who happens to be in front of us at any time.”
Persons in need whose need we are aware of – those are the ones we are called to treat as neighbor, as Jesus illustrates in his parable of the Good Samaritan. Those are the ones we are called to love.
Sorry, Vance, you cannot use the gospel of Jesus to justify cruelty to anyone. And when you try, you only expose how shallow is your understanding of the faith you claim to represent.