JD Vance, Pope Francis and Immigration
By MercatorNet – A Compass for Common Sense
On the day of his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order called “Protecting the American People against Invasion”. It was not language designed to ingratiate himself with the American people’s Catholic bishops. The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, described the executive order as “deeply troubling” and predicted that it “will have negative consequences, many of which will harm the most vulnerable among us”.
To defend the new Administration’s initiative, Vice-President Vance, a Catholic convert, invoked his favourite theologian, the 5th century bishop and philosopher, St Augustine, whose opinion was that people who deserve our good will are ranked in a hierarchy. “Just google ‘ordo amoris’,” he tweeted in response to a critic. “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?”
By the way, in answer to Vance’s rhetorical question, yes, there really are people who think that their duties to children in Zambia are the same as duties to their children. The leading one is the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer along with his acolytes in the “effective altruism” movement. They are nuts.
However, that’s not to say that Vance is correct. In the Vice-President’s hands, “ordo amoris” is Latin for MAGA. As his boss’s executive order put it:
Enforcing our Nation’s immigration laws is critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States. The American people deserve a Federal Government that puts their interests first and a Government that understands its sacred obligation to prioritize the safety, security, and financial and economic well-being of Americans.
And he has described immigrants in dehumanising ways which I am certain would have distressed St Augustine: “These aren’t people, these are animals”. Or “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” Or they’re “poisoning the blood of our nation”.
He has justified his plans to deport 10 or 12 million illegal immigrants by describing them all as criminals. “When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag,”he said shortly after he was elected.
So Vance is partly right and partly wrong. But the part that is right is trivial and the part that is wrong is a distortion of his Church’s teaching. Obviously, it’s right that he should feed his own kids before feeding kids in Zambia. But it’s wrong to sprinkle Latin tidbits over the executive order and to imply that it is applied Catholic social teaching. The English translation of “ordo amoris” is “charity begins at home”, not “mass deportations of animals masquerading as humans”
In any case, “ordo amoris” or ordered charity, is probably not the right frame for the knotty question of immigration, in the US or elsewhere. As Benedict XVI explained in Deus Caritas Est: “Love of neighbour, grounded in the love of God, is first and foremost a responsibility for each individual member of the faithful.” Charity towards our neighbour is by no means irrelevant to the plight of immigrants, legal and illegal. But the first way to determine what a government’s obligations are is through the lens of the virtue of justice. If obligations to migrants are regarded only as acts of charity, they may seem simply supererogatory (google it, to quote Mr Vance). In other words, nice idea but I’m having lunch.
Trump’s plans for those mass deportations may be mostly bluster for his fans. His words are inflammatory and repulsive, but vague. They allow lots of wriggle room for reneging on his more extreme ideas.
However, he is a head of state and his words have to be taken seriously. That must be why Pope Francis has reacted so strongly to Vance’s coopting Catholic social doctrine for Trump’s ambitions. “The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality,” he wrote to American bishops this week. And he went on to say:
This is not a minor issue: an authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized. The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all — as I have affirmed on numerous occasions — welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable.
Trump’s language about immigrants is an affront to human dignity. It’s no wonder that it has incensed the Pope.
JD Vance is an amazing person with astonishing achievements on his CV. Not the least of them is to have been rebuked by the Supreme Pontiff. A few years ago, he wasn’t even a Catholic. This week he became a theological punching bag. The Pope wrote: “The true ordo amoris (a very pointed dig at Vance) 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.”
Without launching into theological exegesis of the parable of the Good Samaritan, the first thing to observe is that he didn’t call the wounded Jew an “animal”. What would Trump have done?
Vance had an acerbic exchange with former British diplomat and politician Rory Stewart over “ordo amoris”. Stewart wrote: “We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love…”
To which Vance responded: “I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: the problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130. This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years.”
Stewart is way, way, way down there in Vance’s “ordo amoris”, so far down that perhaps he looks like the vermin to which Trump has compared immigrants. Perhaps we should just let this arrogant sneer from America’s foremost exegete of St Augustine speak for itself.
Forward this article to friends.
AUTHOR
Michael Cook
Michael Cook is editor of Mercator
RELATED ARTICLES:
The Pope, the Border, and the Law
Israel’s Diaspora Minister to Pope: ‘Jesus lived and died as a Jew’
EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.