Now that Pope Leo XIV has hit the ground running — and done some fence-mending, albeit stiffly, with Vice President JD Vance and the Trump Administration — the Memorial Day weekend is a good moment to look at the overcomplicated idea that created the Trump-Vatican rift in the first place.
Vance earned pushback from the late Pope Francis and his successor — Pope Leo, then Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost — when he invoked the “old school” Christian concept of ordo amoris, saying you love those closest to you first, with that love radiating outward later, presumably in lesser degrees. As Vance told Fox News:
“As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. That doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there’s this old-school (concept)—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.”
The Church, which has a very different view of migrants and others in the Trumpian crosshairs, pushed back on this. Yet Vance is right insofar as he is describing how the world works. As any singleton learns, you are definitely on an outer band — maybe as far as Pluto — with regard to family and friends. And perhaps that’s how it must be. People who have immediate family, especially children, have obligations to them that you don’t have. Similarly, their response to your needs can’t be their first, or even second, priority.
This doesn’t require a Ph.D. in St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, both of whom wrote on ordo amoris, or the ordering of love. It’s just observable common sense. In the same vein, we’re more caught up in local and national news that international news. What’s in front of us gets our attention.
But that is not how the Christian concept of love works. That love — what the ancient Greeks called agape — doesn’t rely on actual relationships and obligations. It gives of itself out of the giver’s heart, and the more the giver gives, the more there is to give, which makes this kind of love transcendent and infinite, unlike time and money.
Spatial rather than temporal, this kind of love lets you play among the concentric circles of relations. It lets you drop off clothes for the homeless on the way to pick up the kids at school, or, better yer, take the kids with you as you volunteer.
Maybe your circle is so overwhelming (caring for a sick parent or handicapped child) that you can’t do or give more than a thought or a prayer. OK, at least you’re doing what you can. And it’s certainly far different from seeing those outside your circle as something “other” to be denounced — or worse, destroyed.
As Tim Wilson, a YouTube personality who comments on politics, religion and philosophy, has observed, we need to figure out a way to embrace the stranger without demeaning the neighbor. But really that shouldn’t be as complicated as it has become. “God loves everyone,” Pope Leo says. To which we might add what Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton wrote in his brilliant “Thoughts on Solitude”: “Only when we can find (God in others) can we start on the road of dark contemplation at whose end we shall be able to find them in Him.”
Tomorrow we commemorate the deaths of those who made the leap of imagination and emotion to the greater love of country and the wider love of those foreigners whom they did not know but still strove to help and liberate. They are often buried in places they would never have thought of visiting and celebrated in tongues they did not understand.
They didn’t have time to order love. They were too busy sharing it.