Vice President Vance, the Good Samaritan, and the “order of love”

It’s not often that Catholic theology breaks into the news cycle, but this is just what happened when Vice President J. D. Vance gave an interview to FOX News defending the Trump administration’s actions regarding immigration and its “America First” stance on foreign policy. Vance appealed to the traditional theological concept of the “order of love” (ordo amoris)—the idea that our love of neighbor has a certain set of priorities—to justify prioritizing the needs of citizens over immigrants and domestic concerns over foreign ones.

As Vance put it:

But there’s this old-school concept—and I think 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.

Immediately, controversy ensued. Some people were surprised to find out that the ordo amoris was a traditional Christian principle at all, while others questioned its compatibility with the teachings of Jesus.

After all, doesn’t the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37) tell us that we are supposed to love our neighbor and that our neighbor is anyone near us, even the foreigner? Still others, recognizing that the principle of the ordo amoris is traditional Christian teaching, questioned what they took to be Vance’s formulation of it, rejecting the notion that the government should not address the needs of non-Americans until all the needs of Americans have been addressed. Finally, other people questioned whether Vance correctly applied the principle of the ordo amoris to the public policy questions that he was addressing.

Whatever one may make of Vance’s views, the controversy he stirred up raised important questions about the role of love in the Christian life. The Bible teaches that the love of neighbor follows necessarily from the love of God, because each person is a reflection of God’s goodness. So, if we love God, then we must esteem each person that we meet, we must will his good, and we must do good things for him. If we love others on account of our love for God, then our neighbor is anyone who is “nigh” to us. Anyone that we can reach with a particular act of love is our neighbor. This is the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan: our neighbor is not just our own kinsman or countryman, but anyone for whom we have the opportunity to wish or do good.

Although we must be willing to do good for every person, this is not actually possible, because we are finite people with finite resources. How do we choose to whom we should do good when we need to make this choice? We follow the ordo amoris. There is an order of priority by which we should choose to do the good.

The basic idea is obvious. If you are sitting in the middle seat of an airplane, with your wife on your left and a stranger on your right, when the air masks come down, you put your mask on first, then you help your wife with her mask, and finally you help the stranger with his. You help everyone whom you can help, but in a certain order. In the order of charity, God comes first, then our spiritual welfare, then our neighbor’s spiritual welfare, then our bodily welfare, then our neighbor’s bodily welfare. Among our neighbors, we prioritize our family, then our friends, then our benefactors, colleagues, other members of our community, our country, and finally the rest of the world. If it is a question of giving a good that is proper to a particular relationship, then we ought to prioritize giving that good to those with whom we share that relationship.

The principle of the ordo amoris, however, is a counsel of prudence; it is not an absolute moral maxim; it presupposes that all other things are equal. But if all other things are not equal, our evaluation of whom to prioritize may change. A greater need in a more distantly related neighbor, which I can alleviate here and now, should often be given preference over a lesser need in a more closely related neighbor.

We must determine when this is the case by a prudent evaluation of the relevant circumstances, and in complex or difficult cases, good and reasonable people will often come to differing conclusions.

This is a part of the debate surrounding Vice President Vance’s comments: if Vance meant to suggest that all the needs of citizens must be satisfied before we meet any of the needs of immigrants or people in other countries, then his statement of the principle of the ordo amoris was not correct. If Vance was giving an abbreviated statement of the principle because he was giving an impromptu answer in an interview, then perhaps he does concede that sometimes the greater needs of others might take priority over the lesser needs of citizens, just not in the case at hand. Vance’s claim, then, that the Trump administration’s spending priorities reflect the ordo amoris would be one of the complex and difficult cases that good and reasonable people must vigorously debate.

Unfortunately, this debate is vitiated by the fact that each side in our politics presumes bad faith in the other side—itself a violation of the command to love our neighbor.

Even though the ordo amoris seems to be a matter of common sense, some people have suggested that it is not compatible with Jesus’ teaching. After all, the parable of the Good Samaritan says that everyone is our neighbor. Jesus says that we should love each other “as he has loved us” (Jn 15:12), and that we should love everyone, just like God who “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Mt 5:45).

But we can love all people while still doing good for all people in a certain order. The ordo amoris does not restrict our love; it orders our love. In fact, the ordo amoris has clear roots in the New Testament. St. Paul teaches, “let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith,” (Gal 6:10) and, “if anyone does not provide for his relatives and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim 5:8).

Still others think that the gospel renders all people equal objects of our love. Doesn’t our new life in Christ render nugatory our natural relationships? No, it does not. Our natural relationships are good and willed by the same God who gives us new life in Christ. God does not take away with grace what he gives with nature; rather, grace builds on nature and perfects it. Therefore, supernatural charity deifies—it heals and elevates—the love that we have for our families, our friends, our community, our country, and for the whole world.

The ordo amoris, then, reminds us that our love for our neighbor is directed at specific people, according to the relationships we have with them. When all the sentiment is stripped away, what is lurking behind the egalitarian impulse to love all people equally is the temptation to replace love of actual people with philanthropy for humanity. If I love everybody equally, then I don’t love anybody specifically. It is a distinctly modern temptation to turn love into an abstraction, doling out goods to people according to an impersonal utilitarian calculus.

But the ordo amoris reminds us that the world is not flat; love occurs within the context of ordered interpersonal relationships. Charity begins at home, where we learn to love the actual people we live with, and from there it extends to successively wider circles, until reaches all people. We arrive at the love of all through the love of those who are near. The ordo amoris is really just the order in which we learn to love our neighbor.

It is the modern affinity for egalitarianism that raises suspicions about the ordo amoris. We moderns think that fairness implies egalitarianism, which thus must characterize divine action. Hence the assumption that the ordo amoris must be incompatible with Jesus’ teaching. But traditionally, Christianity has not shared this assumption. Rather, it assumes the opposite: hierarchy characterizes divine action, because hierarchy indicates order and order is the mark of the wise man. The ordered way in which God pours out his blessings on all creatures is the pattern for how we pour out our love on all people. If the wise person puts all things in order, then the wise lover loves all people in order, according to the relationships he has with them. This is the fundamental insight on which the ordo amoris is based.

The controversy that ensued on Vance’s comments, then, shows that the command to love our neighbor is not a trite moral truism whose meaning is obvious. The command to love our neighbor raises questions about the nature of society and the nature of creation. It is a proposal for how to live a decent human life, and indeed a holy one, as it is an invitation to follow in the footsteps of our savior right into the heart of God who is Love.