It may not be a surprise to hear a Catholic convert who was tutored by Dominicans quoting St. Thomas Aquinas. But certainly nobody had the Vice President of the United States publicly citing the Dominican saint and referring to his theology in Latin on their 2025 bingo card. But that’s exactly what happened last week.
For generations, we have lived under the rule of those who … deride and despise the ordo amoris.
In a Fox News interview, Vance addressed concerns raised by Christians—and especially by U.S. Catholic bishops—over President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, particularly mass deportations. While Vance acknowledged that Christians have a moral obligation to treat others—including strangers and sojourners—with charity, he noted the “Christian concept” that charity must be rightly ordered, that it is, in fact, hierarchical.
“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,” Vance explained. He further observed, “A lot of the far Left has completely inverted that.”
The “Christian concept” Vance cited is called “ordo amoris” or the “order of love” and is well-grounded in Christian theology. Saints Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas both wrote extensively on the subject, hundreds of years apart. According to the saints, we have a higher obligation to love certain people based on our proximity to and relationship with them. “One’s obligation to love a person is proportionate to the gravity of the sin one commits in acting against that love. Now it is a more grievous sin to act against the love of certain neighbors, than against the love of others,” Aquinas explained in his Summa Theologiae. He continued:
We must, therefore, say that, even as regards the affection we ought to love one neighbor more than another. The reason is that, since the principle of love is God, and the person who loves, it must needs be that the affection of love increases in proportion to the nearness to one or the other of those principles. For … wherever we find a principle, order depends on relation to that principle.
In other words, our exercise of charity must be ordered in a particular manner. Our families are to be loved before other people’s families, our neighbors are to be loved before strangers, our fellow Americans are to be loved before citizens of other nations. Aquinas wrote, “Wherefore in matters pertaining to nature we should love our kindred most, in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens, and on the battlefield our fellow-soldiers.”
Of course, leftists often arrogantly (and not quite correctly) like to remind Christians who take a line such as Vance’s that Christ calls us to love all people, regardless of our relationship to them. While this is technically true, it does not actually contradict the principle of the ordo amoris.
Take, for instance, former U.K. politician Rory Stewart, who derided Vance’s profession of longstanding Christian moral teaching as “less Christian and more pagan tribal.” The Vice President doubled down. “Just google ‘ordo amoris,’” he ordered Stewart. Vance went on, “Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?”
Loving your own family does not necessarily come into conflict with loving the citizens of an impoverished Third-World nation, provided that everything is in its right order. However, when the citizen of the impoverished Third-World nation indiscriminately violates one’s laws and jeopardizes the well-being and safety of one’s family, then all is thrown into disorder. In such a case, loving one’s family and loving the Third-World immigrant do come into conflict — and the Christian has a moral obligation to love one’s family first.
Furthermore, as Vance noted, a father has a greater responsibility to love his own children than to love other people’s children. Yes, of course, a good man can still look out for and take care of other people’s children, but not at the expense of his own. This very fact is written into our souls on the most instinctual levels. It’s why mothers and fathers do not hesitate to give up their lives for their own children, it is why we weep most when our own families are harmed, it is why men have put their lives on the line for their nations since just about the beginning of time.
Vance went on to not only correct Stewart, but to shame him for deceptively manipulating Christian teaching so blatantly. “I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: the problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130. This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years,” Vance said.
He is not the first to make such an observation. In The Abolition of Man, Christian author and apologist C.S. Lewis not only made the case for taking the ordo amoris to heart, but predicted the moral corruption that would follow abrogating or ignoring the order of love:
St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ordinate affections or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science.
Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful.
Is it any wonder, then, that so much of the propaganda promoting mass migration — and, indeed, all tenets of leftism, from transgenderism and same-sex “marriage” to abortion and pornography — relies almost entirely (I feel I might even be justified in simply saying “entirely”) on manipulated emotions? The denizens of the Western world are being trained and conditioned to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred not as they ought to, but as leftism demands.
The ordo amoris demands love of one’s neighbor over love of nameless strangers from the Third World; so why not bombard the American voter with incessant images and videos of immigrants in cages or crying at the border wall? These nameless strangers will become, to him, his neighbor. In fact, he will see them more than his own neighbor.
The ordo amoris demands the love of one’s countrymen over the men of other countries; so why not tell the American man that he has no country, that his nation is nothing more than an idea? What then could possibly differentiate him from the hordes of and masses gathering along the border that he no longer believes exists? The ordo amoris demands that one love those who share one’s blood, one’s creed, one’s nationhood; so why not tell the American that diversity is actually our strength? Why not beat him over the brow with this trite, nonsensical axiom for generations? He’ll get it eventually.
For generations, we have lived under the rule of those who not only deride and despise the ordo amoris, if they are even aware of its existence, who not only openly and flagrantly abrogate and violate the principle of the ordo amoris, but those who sneeringly claim that such abrogation and violation is good and just. What a relief it is to once again have a national leader who not only understands but boldly proclaims the order which God has written in the hearts of men to govern love.
READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy:
Vanquish or Die: The Choice Before the Catholic Church in America
