A Very Christian Concept

The War on God has a Catholic front, and it has seen some fighting lately.

The chief battle, of course, comes from crypto-paganism, in the form of what the press calls  President Trump's "transactional" view of relationships, which recognizes no principles except self-interest, and so cannot conceive of altruism or charity as ends in themselves.  This meshes easily with a variety of other ideologies: New Thought, the Prosperity Gospel, even good old Objectivism.  To be clear, the president is not himself an ideologue; he is rather a raging Id, a Hyde with no Jekyll; but he is surrounded by people who have constructed or borrowed ideological structures to justify their own self-interest.

With this in mind, it is interesting to consider our vice-president, JD Vance.  Vance is quite a different figure from Trump.  Rather than privilege, he is a child of relative poverty, whose Horatio-Alger story has been the subject both of a bestseller and a movie.  Where Trump seems to have emerged from his father's brow a fully-formed braggart, liar, swindler and racist, Vance has engaged in a more interesting process of self-creation; his rise from poverty, his education, his profession(s), and even his name are the result of his own deliberate and purposeful choices. 

What interests us in all this is that Vance is an adult convert to Roman Catholicism, having been baptized and confirmed in 2019, at the age of 35.  It would be a terrible injustice to attribute something as personal as a spiritual conversion to expressly political motives, but it should be noted that, rather than being formed intellectually by the church, Vance entered the church fully formed as an intellectual and a politician.  As he said to his friend Rod Dreher, 

My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching. That was one of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church. 

This remark is noteworthy because, to an outside observer, it raises the question of how much Vance knew at that point in his life about the details of Catholic social teaching.  Surely he knew about abortion and birth control. Had he yet been catechized concerning, for example, the rights of workers to form and join unions? The preferential option for the poor? Unclear, but he was already helping to lead a party that is sketchy about these things, and many other things spelled out in the documents.

Questions like this became more pointed on 30 January 2025, when Vance, during an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, said: 

... as an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn't mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. But there's this old school, and I think it's a very Christian concept by the way, 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 and prioritize 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. 

Many listeners resonated easily with this statement.  It appeals to our sense of what is "natural." It is hard to imagine caring about a far-off stranger the way one does for one's spouse or child.  As church council members never tire of saying, "charity begins at home." Right?

But Vance identified this as "a Christian concept," and one did not need to be an expert theologian to observe that, as such, it struck a sour note  After all, agape, a foundational Christian idea, is understood to be a universal love, one which is not conditioned by relationships of family, tribe, nation or what have you.  Specifically placing "neighbor" between family and community will have drawn a cringe from those reared on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Actual skilled theologians were quick to observe that, so far as they could tell, Vance had been referring to, and misrepresenting, the ordo amoris. That phrase literally means the "order of love," although it is often glossed in English as "rightly-ordered love," which isn't unfair. One finds it articulated by Augustine in The City of God, 15:22, and refined by Aquinas in the Summa, 2/2/Q26.  (Both, incidentally and somewhat strainedly, cite Songs 2:4, which says in the Vulgate "ordinavit in me caritatem.")

To be clear, Augustine does not say what Vance attributes to him.  For one thing, and we may call this the first flaw, Vance doesn't mention God, whereas Augustine's central point is that God must be loved above all other beings.  This is because lesser things -- art, music, a spouse -- are susceptible to being loved wrongly, because they are loved in preference to to God or to the things God wants.  This is not because art, music or a spouse are bad, but because human beings are sinful. As Augustine puts it, "when a miser loves his gold more than justice, it is not the fault of the gold." Aquinas even argues that we are obliged to love our neighbor (a term he does not define with Vance's narrowness) more than our own body.

So if the first flaw in Vance's attempt at theology is setting God aside, the second is that he replaces God's desires for us with what we may (and Augustine does) call the desires of the flesh.  Because of these flaws, he proposes an order of love that is quite at odds with the one known to the Christian tradition. Vance wants us to love family first, a concept that would have been ridiculous to the generations of Christians who looked to the fable of St Thecla for solace when faith separated them from their families. He wants us to love our nation next, which would have looked suspicious to those same early Christians as they died rather than sacrifice to the emperors. What he does not ask us to love, but Augustine does, is virtue itself, and things virtuously.  

All Christians have a right to think as deeply as they are able about the things of God.  But when Roman Catholic leaders of nations begin to opine in public about theology, they will naturally draw the attention of those to whom theological judgments have been entrusted in their church -- meaning, ultimately, the Pope. And so on 10 February 2025, US bishops received a letter from Pope Francis which referred obliquely to "the crisis in the United States," meaning the Trump Administration's announced program of mass deportations, which it described as problematic from the point of view of Catholic social teaching.  (You remember:  the same Catholic social teaching that Vance was so excited about in 2019).

Francis also addressed, beginning with paragraph 6, Vance's misrepresentation of Catholic doctrine:

6. Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. 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” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.

7. But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.

Yes, we know:  it is written in Vaticanese, so it seems dull or even obscure.  Read closely, however, this is a sharp rebuke.  "Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests" -- which is just how Vance described it. Instead, the Pope reminds us, each of us Christians has a relationship with all people, and it is through these relationships, especially with the poorest," that we become our true selves.  Talking about our relationships, such as national identity, apart from this universal relationship and option for the poor is to take part in a lie told by the strong to harm the weak.

That's what the Pope's letter actually says, in print, and it is a swayt on the knuckles with the proverbial rule.  Reading between the lines, the message is more like a slap in the face:  Hey, JD -- leave theology to the theologians.