Our country is in a tumultuous debate about what to make of the foreigner. Whether with questions of foreign aid or welcoming the refugee and immigrant, the Trump administration is a challenge to those who hold that we ought to love not only our own citizens but all people. Currently, U.S.A.I.D. is being dismantled, Venezuelan refugees have lost Temporary Protected Status, Afghans who worked with us in Afghanistan who received refugee status have been turned away and Catholic Charities is under attack because it helps immigrants and refugees in need.
It is in this context that Vice President JD Vance introduced the idea of the ordo amoris, or ordering of loves, into this discourse. During a Fox News interview, he stated, “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.” Mr. Vance’s words launched a thousand takes on social media and beyond. Some of the critiques of his words were too strong, especially when they claimed that what he was saying was not Christian. And yet Mr. Vance gets a lot wrong.
The ordering of loves arose for St. Augustine in the fifth century out of his realization that everything that God made is good. In Augustine’s conception and in later iterations in church teaching, including Aquinas, the ordo amoris is a pedagogy of the heart meant to teach us to love all of this goodness rightly. When we get our order of love wrong—when we love less what we should love more and more what we should love less—we sin.
Augustine explains the order of loves in two ways. The first is that we ought to love God first and all things in or for God. After and in God, we ought to love virtue, ourselves and each other, and then material goods. In light of this, there is a secondary sense of ordering our loves that has to do with the order of whom we will love. It is here that JD Vance gets a lot right and a lot wrong.
What Mr. Vance gets right is the commonsense nature of love. Due to the nature of intimacy and moral obligation, I do in fact have deeper obligations to care for and serve those closer to me. If I feed someone else’s children and do not feed mine, I sin. Likewise, American politicians do have a primary responsibility for American well-being, especially those in need. What is less clear about Mr. Vance’s proclamation is who exactly disagrees with that ordering. Supposedly, liberals have abandoned this idea, but as far as I can tell, the Biden administration pushed to continue an expanded child tax credit that lifted millions of American children out of poverty. The child tax credit was only for Americans, and it was ended by Republicans.
What Mr. Vance gets wrong is that the point of Christian teaching is to expand, even transform, our order of loves. If our explanations of Christianity do not “build up this double love of God and neighbor,” as Augustine writes in On Christian Doctrine, then we have failed to understand Christianity. Mr. Vance has gotten the letter but not the spirit—and “the letter kills but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6). The goal is to broaden our loves, expand our hearts and intensify our attempts to reach people who are in need.
The order of loves is not supposed to put boundaries around our loves but to expand them outward to be ever more encompassing. An example of this is the March for Life, where Mr. Vance and others marched not to protect their own babies but the babies of others. The desire to protect and serve the unborn is emblematic of a broadening ordo amoris; so, too, is the desire to protect and serve the immigrant.
St. Augustine writes in On Christian Doctrine that “the word ‘neighbor’ implies a relationship; one can only be a neighbor to a neighbor.” One might think Augustine is narrowing our obligations to those next to us, but, in fact, he asks, “Who can fail to see that there is no exception to this, nobody to whom compassion is not due?” For Augustine, our hearts tend to contract, closing out God and the needy. To grasp the ordo amoris is to make room for God and neighbor, most especially our neighbor in need, for it is our neighbor in need with whom God identifies. Christ is the foreigner.
While the Trump administration seems unwilling to do very much for the poor in our midst, they are certainly committed to turning away non-Americans in poverty. Why should we not do this? First, for Augustine, all of humanity is one family; thus the refugee at the border or the starving child in Sudan is not distant to us but is our kin. Second, the order of loves should broaden our interest in helping those who cross our paths and those who beg at our doors. For Augustine, “we are God’s beggars” and God will ignore our prayers if we do not aid those who beg from us. Third, need is a primary orienting principle of the ordo amoris. In his Sermons, the importance of need is so strong that he tells his congregants either not to leave an inheritance to their children because they have left it to the poor or at least to divide that inheritance between Christ (the poor) and their own children.
Finally, welcoming the immigrant has always been hard for Americans, whether we are talking about Germans in the 1790s, Irish in the 1840s, Italians in the 1890s or Venezuelans today. But every time that we have welcomed them it has benefited us. To welcome the immigrant is to engage in the ordo amoris for us as much as it is for them. It is one of the most profound acts of love for our country that I can think of.
Augustine is not interested in an abstract love of “humanity” that does not do anything for anyone. The ordo amoris makes love concrete and realistic. I pray that JD Vance will heed the words of the teaching authority of the church, read Pope Francis’ teaching and attend to what St. Augustine is calling for. Each summons us to a deeper, broader, enacted love that embraces those close to us and extends to those far from us. The ordo amoris was never about loving less or more narrowly—but about loving more and more widely.
