The problem with JD Vance’s theology of ‘ordo amoris’—and its impact on policy

It is not often that terms from moral theology like the ordo amoris make it into the U.S. news cycle—but we live in extraordinary times. In a recent Fox News interview, Vice President JD Vance invoked the traditional theological notion of the “order of love” to justify the Trump administration’s aggressive cancellation or suspension of almost all U.S. foreign aid programs. Other commentators, including First Things editor R. R. Reno, publicly endorsed Mr. Vance’s way of scaling our moral responsibilities.

Mr. Vance argued that the Trump administration is following “the Christian view” of our responsibilities based on his reading of Thomas Aquinas’s “order of love.” The vice president put it this way: “We should love our family first, then our neighbors, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.”

This moral vision has enormous real-world consequences, as we are beginning to see already. The vice president maintains that we ought to resolve our domestic problems before worrying about distant nations and their people. Many Americans agree with this view, and seem untroubled by the fact that many who advocate the policy of “charity begins at home” are happy to have it remain there.

Mr. Vance tries to use Aquinas’s order of love to support his political ideology, but is the ethical order he proposes actually consistent with the ethic of Aquinas or, more broadly, with the principles of Catholic social teaching?

The interpretation Mr. Vance proposes seems more focused on setting limits to love than on ordering it properly. In his telling, the ordo amoris is about how our limited capacity for love should be parceled out, suggesting an almost metaphysical inevitability that it will run out without anything left over for vulnerable people at the margins of society. This amounts to little more than window dressing for a cramped, self-interested in-group morality that falls drastically short of the account of the order of love proposed by Aquinas and expanded by Catholic social teachings.

Aquinas on love and charity

What did Thomas Aquinas mean when he wrote of the “order of love”?

In its most basic sense, “love” is willing the good to someone. While we are required to will the good to everyone, we cannot as finite creatures actively do the good to everyone, so we have to be selective. The good we ought concretely to will to others is shaped by our particular relationship to them. Your duty to do the good to those in some way or other connected to you takes precedence over your responsibility to more remote others, at least when it comes to the good that is the basis of your connection.

Aquinas balances love among family members with responsibilities that pertain to other kinds of relationships. Healthy and right familial love is generally “ordered” in the sense that (under normal circumstances) we ought to honor our parents more than other elders, care for our own children more than other children and commit ourselves to an exclusive physical and emotional intimacy with a spouse that is different in kind from other forms of intimacy. The order of love provides a broad framework for thinking about the general shape of our responsibilities, but it does not ignore the fact that at times the contingencies of life can require us to override our usual priorities.

There are several problems with Mr. Vance and his defenders’ conception of the order of love. First, their account tends to view love, at least beyond the family, as something like modern charity—donating resources out of the kindness of your heart. Aquinas, on the other hand, thought of caritas in fundamentally relational terms—as a kind of bond, friendship or communion in Christ. Modern charity gives from a safe distance, but caritas seeks union born of love.

Second, Mr. Vance—and Mr. Reno and others following—does not follow Aquinas in acknowledging that the love of God is the foundation, the focus and the animating heart of the Christian ordering of love (the ordo caritatis, to be more precise). God loves the whole of the entire created order and human beings as participants in that wider world. Since all persons are created in the image of God, we share a fundamental equality of intrinsic dignity. The universality of divine love and its expression in the creation of the human person provides the basis of the Christian commitment to willing the good of every neighbor without exception.

Third, Mr. Vance and his supporters hold that we should first love our families and then love our neighbors. They seem to be thinking of “neighbors” in a literal sense, as particular people who live in our vicinity. Their narrow usage does not comport with Jesus’ own expansion of the term to include not just the “near ones” living in our “neighborhood” but all human beings.. Jesus considered all the following as neighbors: widows and orphans, the poor, sick and disabled, social outcasts and, yes, alien workers.

In a letter to the U.S. bishops on Feb. 10, Pope Francis noted that “[T]he 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 scope of our moral concern

Fourth, in the Catholic tradition, we care for the community in part by fulfilling our responsibilities to our families, friends, co-workers, fellow citizens and more. Following Aristotle, Aquinas argues that just as the whole has priority over its parts, so the common good of the community is “more perfect” and a “greater good” than the private good of its members.

Fifth, it is important to note that Mr. Vance’s ordering of obligation involves love of one’s country. Country as nation-state is not an item of love in Aquinas’s order of love (Italy did not become a unified country until 1861), but he did respect ties and duties to one’s principality, city, state or king. Catholic ethics today does value a healthy love of one’s country, but not the further claim that we have no responsibilities to citizens of other countries.

It is not possible to square Aquinas’s notion of the ordo amoris with a position that sharply separates love of our fellow Americans from any concern for outsiders, whether or not they reside in our midst. Mr. Vance supports a policy that does not allow migrants forced to leave their homes by violence and extreme hardship even to apply for asylum, a right legally enshrined in the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980. Catholic ethics values an ordered patriotic love of one’s country, yes, but not a nationalistic xenophobia that refuses to see fellow human beings in extreme need as one’s neighbors.

Sixth, Mr. Vance’s position concedes that Americans might have some minimal responsibility to people of other countries, but this suggestion appears only as a grudging theoretical concession. Until we have our own house completely in order, the argument runs, we should not even “consider the interests of the rest of the world,” let alone do anything that might help regions that are suffering the most, sometimes due to our own policies—unless of course doing so contributes directly to the prosperity of the United States. Since the poor will always be with us, this proviso in effect indefinitely postpones—and functionally denies—any moral responsibility our government might have for people in the global South caught in terrible humanitarian crises, including famine, epidemics and civil wars.

No true Catholic ethic relegates mass numbers of distant suffering neighbors to the outer periphery of our moral concern. The fact that we cannot love every neighbor “in the same way and to the same degree,” as Mr. Reno rightly notes, does not justify loving only our own people and ignoring the rest of humanity—which is exactly what Mr. Vance’s reading of the ordering of love proposes. Such a love, in Christian terms, is anything but properly “ordered.”

Seventh, in a radical departure from Aquinas, neither Mr. Vance nor Mr. Reno factor degrees of need into their order of love. Mr. Reno writes: “Neglecting the needs of someone in Syria by failing to make a donation to a relief organization may be sinful… (I emphasize may.) But standing by with indifference when one’s neighbor is in distress is likely a graver sin.” He here implies that we should regard the intense suffering of Syrians subjected to kidnapping, gassing, abductions, disappearances, maiming, torture and massacres as less important to us than any kind of distress undergone by people in our own communities and country.

Both Mr. Vance and Mr. Reno consider proximity to us but ignore need. Aquinas, on the other hand, understood that sometimes we must prioritize the more urgent needs of strangers over the mere wants of our loved ones. On some occasions, he points out, we ought to give concrete help to those, “who have greater want…rather than to one who is more closely united to us…” (Summa Theologica, II-II, 31 ,9; see also 30, 3).

Aquinas may have had in mind destitute beggars he encountered on the streets of Paris or Naples, but today we have to be cognizant not only of the homeless who sleep in our parks but also the desperately poor souls trapped in the favelas of Rio or the slums of Nairobi—not primarily by direct service but by supporting institutions that try to address the expressed needs of such people and ensure their rights are respected.

Subsidiarity and solidarity

One final note: Mr. Vance’s interpretation of the order of love ignores the role of institutions as vehicles of both love and justice. Consider this quote from Mr. Reno’s essay in Compact: “Christ-like love encourages concern for victims of fires in other states, regions, or countries. But all the more so does Christ-like love compel us to come to the aid of neighbors whose houses down the street are burning.”

If you are able, of course, you should run outside and hose down the side of the neighbor’s house, but what your neighbor really needs is for a team of firefighters to show up as soon as possible. Fire departments are run by city governments and funded by taxes. If you love your neighbor (in both senses of the term) you must vote for government officials and policies that don’t leave homeowners trying to put out raging fires with their garden hoses. Catholic social teaching acknowledges the contribution of well-run institutions to the common good in ways that such a pinched reading of the order of love does not.

As several recent popes have repeatedly insisted, love of neighbor should not stop at acts of individual virtue but must also inspire a personal and collective commitment to correcting structural injustice. The principle of subsidiarity recognizes that in many cases only governments have the resources to deal with large-scale problems rooted in structural injustice.

Consider one concrete example. In 2003, President George W. Bush established PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Since its inception, PEPFAR has invested over $110 billion in its response to the pandemic. This single program is credited with saving over 26 million lives and enabled more than five million babies to be born H.I.V.-free. This program serves people who do not have much if any access to testing, antiretroviral treatment or critical care and support. No amount of private giving from well-meaning donors is sufficient to tackle such a massive challenge.

Currently, PEPFAR’s ability to function and its future are in question due to the Trump administration’s funding pauses and chaotic restructuring of American humanitarian aid. Supporting government programs like PEPFAR is a practical and effective way of loving the distant neighbor. Conversely, cutting this kind of program functions to abandon some of our most desperately needy brothers and sisters.

The Thomistic order of love, properly construed, recognizes that we should care for our nearest and dearest while also giving a special priority to the least of our brothers and sisters.

Speaking more broadly, the Catholic ethic is both personal and social, open to the world rather than turned inward, and marked by compassion and justice rather than indifference or hostility. It offers a distinctively Christian vision of the order of love that tries to do justice to responsibilities to loved ones and to strangers in need, both individual and collective.

We are all surely more prone to focus narrowly on caring for family and friends rather than on showing hospitality to strangers and reaching out to the “wretched of the earth.” But we find a corrective vision in Pope John Paul II’s urging us to cultivate the virtue of solidarity, Pope Benedict XVI’s concern for the “universal common good” and Pope Francis’ promotion of accompaniment and fraternity.

We should not allow love for ourselves, our families, community and country to obscure our responsibility to address the grave and urgent needs of our brothers and sisters forced to dwell on the margins of our world. Striving to live out this kind of love does not make one a “liberal,” let alone part of the “radical left”—just a Christian.