Francis Claps Back
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.
That Francis explicitly rebukes Vance is extraordinary. But then, so too is Vance’s consistent and dangerous demonizing and scapegoating of migrants. Recall his justification, during the campaign last summer, for gleefully spreading Trump’s racist lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating their neighbors’ pets. Vance told reporters he was willing “to create stories” in order to draw attention to the “suffering of Americans.” As any Catholic with a firm grasp of the sacramental imagination ought to know, words matter: those same fictions Vance amplified were responsible for bomb threats that forced the evacuations of schools and government offices.
Clear, powerful, and self-evidently true as they are, Francis’s words in defense of migrants and refugees seem unlikely to persuade the Trump administration to change course any time soon. Trump border czar Tom Homan, boasting of his status as a “lifelong Catholic” who’d made his first communion and been confirmed, sneeringly directed “harsh words” at the pope from the White House driveway, repeating the tired (and inaccurate) Trumpian talking point about the Vatican being “surrounded by walls” as he flippantly told the pontiff to “fix” the Church “and leave border enforcement to us.” What would Homan, a proud Catholic, have done if he’d encountered a wounded traveler along the road?
It remains to be seen whether Francis’s letter will have any effect on those who ought to know better. Will the “pastors of the People of God who walk together in the United States of America,” until now friendly to Trump for his stance on abortion and transgender people, vociferously defend their flock? We shouldn’t expect much by way of resistance from figures like New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who has boasted of his close relationship with Trump. But other, more serious, thoughtful bishops—like El Paso’s Mark Seitz, Brownsville’s Daniel Flores, Chicago’s Blase Cupich, and Washington’s Robert McElroy, among others—have shown themselves resolute, even defiant, in the face of Trump’s fear-mongering.
Here’s hoping that their objections only get louder. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shares images of encampments under construction in Guantánamo Bay, now is the time for bishops to raise their voices and match the courage of other religious leaders, like their Episcopal colleague Bishop Mariann Budde. Speaking out in similar terms is likely to earn the bishops opprobrium, and may even alienate the millions of Catholics who pulled the lever for Trump. So be it. The crisis that motivated Pope Francis’s letter is not a simple matter of public policy, but a moral emergency: those in control of the richest, most powerful country in the world have asserted their right to brutalize the poorest and most vulnerable: “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.” Roma locuta est; now let all of us listen.
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