‘Ordo Amoris’ according to JD Vance and Pope Francis
Anthony McCarthy• February 19, 2025
What is the ordo amoris and why should we care about it? Just over a week ago, Pope Francis, in a letter to US Bishops, wrote the following:
“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.”
The proximate cause of the letter appears to have been comments by the US Vice President, and Catholic convert, JD Vance. Vance, addressing the always-difficult subject of immigration and in criticism of the US Bishops’ migrant programme, had opined: “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 neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world.”
Vance’s point was the US should prioritise the needs of US citizens above those of other nationals.
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Vance later clarified his comments by referring to the ordo amoris – the order of love mentioned by St Thomas Aquinas – through which we understand how to love others in ways appropriate to their relationship to us, loving more those closest to us (for example, family members) because of the particular ways and opportunities we have to love them.
Vance’s words were welcomed by many, especially conservative thinkers who are understandably sceptical of social utopianism and rationalist political thinking, which, in the name of omnipotent “reason”, favours the abstract and distant; condemning a supposed “irrational” bias towards the local and familiar.
Conservative thought has tended, in reaction to certain Enlightenment models of thought, to emphasise the ingrained and habit-formed morality of hearth and home. And it is true that, given the kind of creatures we are, we learn through the school of the intimate about what is truly good, beginning with those family relationships which are quite literally irreplaceable.
We learn in the hierarchy of the family – a hierarchy which can be a mirror of the nature of God’s love for us.
Egalitarianism and impartiality, on the other hand, should not be promoted at the cost of more urgent moral claims. The mechanisation of benevolence threatens to “critique” and stifle our most fundamental moral experiences of human solidarity. As GK Chesterton put it, “Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance.” Indeed, those very wider sympathies we must also develop are (or should be) taught us by our parents.
Was Pope Francis denying what is surely part of the moral consensus of humanity – that the ordo amoris guides how we love others, whom we cannot all love in the same way? Surely not. Rather, his invocation of the Good Samaritan is timely and various lessons can be taken from the story. Fraternity is indeed universal, and we must wish the same good things to others as to our kin and co-nationals – but not necessarily wish them to the same extent.
On the one hand, the Good Samaritan story shows the necessity to expand our sympathies beyond the familiar and the tribal. The Good Samaritan responded to the needs of someone who was not only a stranger but from a different religious group. Admirable for his generous response, the Good Samaritan was also admirable in his practicality.
He was going somewhere, which was evidently important enough for him to continue his journey before coming back to check how the stranger was faring at the inn. He gave medical assistance and then partially delegated the problem – for which there was (as so often is the case) a financial cost.
In the meantime, the Priest and Levite represent not just ourselves at our least attractive, but those who did not understand the deeper meaning of the Old Covenant and thereby failed their nation and people. For, as the Church Fathers knew, the victim represents Adam, fallen man on a journey from Jerusalem to Jericho and the Good Samaritan is a type of Christ.
In fact, we all believe in the ordo amoris, understood as a natural order of priorities which, however, must encompass the urgent needs, at the very least, of those who immediately cross our path. The Good Samaritan might have been on a family errand that he was (rightly) forced to delay somewhat. But what if his own son had also been a victim of robbers, and was lying next to the stranger, in the same dire condition?
If my son is injured, should I not prioritise taking him to A&E as soon as possible? The answer seems obvious: of course I should – what kind of father wouldn’t? Yet if I take him to A&E and the doctor treats him, the doctor will delay treating the person next in line who has his own family and is also in dire need of help. Should I therefore sacrifice my parental responsibilities to some “wider duty” concerning someone else’s child?
On the other hand, my son’s minor ailment should not be prioritised over a stranger’s life – particularly when that stranger has already become a “close neighbour”, at least in terms of physical proximity.
As the philosopher David Oderberg puts it:
“The Priest and Levite were what we might call ‘default proximates’ by virtue of various communal ties – blood, racial, religious, country. The Samaritan…became a proximate as soon as he was, like the other two, physically close and in a position to help…Note the use of words in the parable such as ‘came near’, ‘seeing’, ‘moved’: we are not concerned here with a person thinking the abstract and precious thought, ‘whom might I help today?’ but with someone who passively became a proximate through simply passing by, and then actively involved himself in the victim’s plight.”
The debate over immigration – like other debates over the interaction between our duties to strangers and to our kin and co-nationals – is genuinely difficult. It not helped by over-simplifications of positions, whether it’s the crude assumption that Vance is some kind of tribal-fascist, or the equally crude assumption that the Vatican is little better than a politically-correct, elitist, UN-NGO-type.
That there are elites who weaponise mass immigration at the expense of social cohesion is not to be doubted. Yet there are others who weaponise the consequences of mass immigration and gain political power from demonising others while never solving the problems they claim to care about.
We can only try to keep in balance our duties to our own and our duties to expand our sympathies beyond our immediate horizons – sympathies which should be learnt in the “school of love” of both the family and the wider Church.
The Church has always known that, unavoidably, there are “winners and losers” in this world – but, the Church also emphasises, that fact does not absolve us from the need to seek to alleviate, with generosity and prudence, the sufferings of those who cross our path.
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Photo collage: JD Vance (Getty Images) and Pope Francis (Getty Images).