The Right Ordering of Love in the Political Sphere

The ordo amoris (the “order of love”) is a concept found in St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas that, outside of theological circles, was little discussed in recent times until it resurfaced in remarks by Vice President J.D. Vance. Those remarks, in turn, drew pushback in a February 10 letter from Pope Francis to the Catholic bishops of the United States.

Vance raised the issue during a January 30 interview about immigration. He insisted that prioritizing those closer to you by reason of objective relationships does not mean “you hate people from outside” those relationships. It does mean, he claimed, 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 [on] and prioritize the rest of the world.” Vance used that example in contrast to what he considers the global Left’s approach, which seems to suggest that government leaders should “care more about people outside their own borders” than their fellow citizens.

The Pope objected, insisting:

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. (no. 6)

Both men are right.

Another forgotten concept in good theology, an essential methodological starting point, is clarification of terms. If there’s any term in English more likely to generate confusion, it’s love — and I don’t really think love per se (as opposed to concrete actions done in its name) is what Vance had in mind. Perhaps Vance’s greatest fault was his use of the words love, then, and after that. Love of neighbor is always universal. Love is not a step-by-step “then” and “after that” process that must be completed in Ring A before moving to Ring B and so forth. The Pope rightly objects to a concept of Christian love that seems to seep out “little by little,” extending into ever broader circles. And Francis is correct that the Parable of the Good Samaritan frames our horizon of love: we are called to love everyone without exception, what the Pope describes as “a fraternity open to all.”

But Francis mischaracterizes Vance’s rhetorical model by describing it as “a concentric expansion of interests” (interessi; emphasis added). Vance did not speak of “interests” (even if Francis might have interpreted him that way) but of love, which suggests that Vance’s conscience wrestled with how morally to prioritize claims made in love’s name.

So, if both men are right and both wrong, how can we better understand the problem? Perhaps it’s neither “love” per se nor even just “interests” but how that “loving” takes concrete form in a given situation. I offer these thoughts as a possible way to square this circle and invite critical feedback.

I would tackle the problem by going back to Karol Wojtyła. More than two decades before becoming Pope John Paul II, the young Fr. Wojtyła wrote a series of essays for the Kraków Catholic newspaper Tygodnik powszechny. Those essays went by the collective title Elementarz etyczny (“The Ethics Primer”) and addressed various questions, both long term and modern, in the moral field. One of those essays, Problem walki (“The Problem of Struggle”) is relevant to the Vance-Francis dispute. Wojtyła wrote about “struggle” in a communist-ruled country, where the regnant ideology claims that struggle is the motor advancing history and social justice. This vision of history and justice, Wojtyła insisted, rests on a purely material basis. Marxism, built on materialistic foundations, deals only with material goods, the only “goods” which, according to those premises, exist. But the problem with material goods is that they diminish by division: four people are going to get proportionately less of the same pizza than two. If reality is purely material, then you will see life as a struggle to get your “piece of the pie.”

But that vision of reality is wrong, said Wojtyła. Christianity offers the counterpoint to the materialistic view of reality. It recognizes a spiritual order in addition to and above the material order. The “goods” of that spiritual order — which include love — differ from material goods in that they can be shared without diminishment; unlike a pizza, I can love additional people without having to take “some” love from the others. Recognizing the priority of the spiritual — including the primacy of charity — provides the necessary corrective to the limitations the materialist vision imposes. The primary relationship among people need not be one of “struggle” over a limited set of material goods. It can be one of love, in which those material goods can be shared.

As an aside, I’d observe that even the sharing of theoretically non-diminishable spiritual goods can be problematic for limited and sinful man. It doesn’t work with polygamy, arguably because — declared intentions aside — it is hard not to use the others as things, either for pleasure or fertility. “Love” must contend with divided attention, jealousy, and so on. Consider the case of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar in the Old Testament. It was Sarah who suggested Abraham have a child through her slave Hagar, but after Ishmael’s birth, it was Sarah who pressed Abraham to throw out Hagar and the child (cf. Gen. 16:1-4; 21:9-10).

Wojtyła would return to the spiritual/material goods problem just before his pontifical election. In connection with his book Osoba i czyn (Person and Act) he wrote a number of essays on the questions of “alienation” and “participation.” Like struggle, alienation was another leading idea in the communist toolkit. For the communists, “alienation” is the disorder of man’s relationship to things, to his products. Wojtyła did not deny that such disorder exists but insisted that seeing the problem only in those terms is shortsighted. Man’s fundamentally disordered relationship is not with things but with his fellow man. It is at the latter level that the problem has to be fixed through love, which finds expression through participation. Sharing might involve how we divide goods; participation involves how we deal with people. And the latter requires that we always treat the other as a person, as an object of love and not merely of use.

How do we apply all this to the debate between the Vice President and the Pope, and how might the ordo amoris concept fit into it? As previously noted, we are always called to love all people. Our fundamental posture toward the other must be to see him as a person to be loved, not an object to be used or, worse, a burden to be avoided. Can we then talk about a “right ordering of love,” especially in the political dimension?

Yes.

We cannot exclude the other from our love because the other is a person. That is our fundamental obligation. But it is not our only obligation. Persons, after all, are composite beings, both bodily and spiritual. That fact corresponds also to the existence of material and spiritual goods in the world. And that difference in goods seems to have a role in our obligations of love.

We owe all persons, without exception, the spiritual good of love. But, as St. James points out, the abstract notion of love often has to be translated into concrete terms and things. “If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day,” he writes, “and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,’ but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it? So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead. Indeed someone may say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Demonstrate your faith to me without works, and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works” (Jas. 2:15-18).

What is said here of faith might also apply to love.

When we move from the spiritual but somewhat abstract good of love to its material, concrete incarnation, we move into the realm of material goods — like warm coats — that is, goods that diminish by division. That raises the question of a just and fair distribution of that finite pool of goods. In that work, the ordo amoris seems to apply.

A father’s first duty is to feed his family before he feeds the local beggar. That does not necessarily mean he does not love the beggar, but there is a fixed amount of soup in the pot. A community’s first duty is to take care of the destitute person on its street, not the destitute person in the next state. And a nation’s first duty is to attend to its citizens’ material needs before those of the “global community.”

Yes, we can be selfish, blind both to others’ needs and our own blessings. But that is not automatically the case — and it would be unfair to think it is. It does not necessarily mean the father does not love the beggar, the Cincinnatian the poor man across the river in Kentucky, or the American the Burundian. It can simply offer a rationally — and lovingly — fair distribution of finite material resources.

The ordo amoris is also arguably a mirror image of the Catholic social principle of subsidiarity, which recognizes that needs (including material needs) should be addressed and problems solved at the most immediately and personally engaged level, rather than from a remote distance.

Human needs usually surpass human resources. That’s true both because “the poor you will have with you always” (Mt. 26:11) and, depending on the societies in question, “poverty lines” are often different. There is no automatic answer to how to allocate limited resources amid those diverse circumstances. That allocation requires prudential judgments, made by those responsible for a particular community based on priorities the ordo amoris may dictate.

Obviously, a leader cannot harbor hatred toward the other, especially the more distant that other might be from the community for which the leader is responsible. But as long as the leader maintains the right attitude toward the person of the other, it seems we should respect his judgment in conscience on how to prioritize the allocation of the limited resources he commands. He must, after all, take into account not just which resources are immediately available, but he must also make prudent judgments about allocating priorities in the long term. Even Christian leaders in a country with a $36.5 trillion national debt are not obliged to provide a cavalier “magnanimity” that merely forwards the bill to generations unborn.

A good leader will expand the pie — that is, he will recognize that even material goods are not necessarily a zero-sum game, but that, through the participation of human creativity, the pool can be expanded for all. That expansion, however, does not happen automatically. It requires long-term economic-policy choices that spur such creativity, which also requires affording a measure of good faith in the moral rectitude of the leaders to whom we entrust those decisions.

So, does that mean we need not care for Lazarus? That Dives could have salved his conscience? Remembering that parables generally teach us one essential truth, no. Dives had responsibility for Lazarus because Lazarus was a person, and Dives had the resources to come to his assistance. Vincible ignorance includes closing our eyes to he who is clearly in front of us. But there is a difference between feigning ignorance of the needy man on our doorsteps and assessing what can be done on a hemispheric or global scale with the finite resources entrusted to a leader’s prudent stewardship.

And no, Dives did not have a “closer relationship” to his dogs because, as St. Thomas reminds us, the ordo amoris presupposes a loving relationship of persons — and dogs are not persons.

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