This RNS headline conveys the facts of the matter — “Pope Francis takes aim at Vance’s definition of ‘ordo amoris’ in letter to US Bishops” — but it doesn’t capture the full enormity of J.D. Vance’s huniliation here.
The vice president has been very publicly pontificating — condescendingly lecturing others about the proper understanding of Catholic doctrine. Vance has been aggressively telling anyone who would listen that they just don’t understand that church teaching the way that he does, and now he has been very publicly corrected by the actual Pope literally pontificating to him to STFU and spend some time reading the Bible because Vance has made it very clear he doesn’t have the slightest idea what it says.
I mean, jeez, that’s devastating. If Vance were an honest person, or if he were a person capable of shame, or if he were a person interested in what is true this would be an edifyingly humbling experience for him. Alas, he is immune to both humility and to edification because he is none of those things — not an honest person, nor a person capable of shame, nor a person interested in what is true.
The pope’s letter came shortly after Vance spoke about his understanding of “ordo amoris” in an interview with Fox News. “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 vice president said. According to Vance, Democrats and liberals had inverted that order of relationships.
After receiving backlash, Vance expanded on his remarks, urging his followers on X to “just google ordo amoris,” in a post on Jan. 30.
The fancy schmancy Latin there means “ordered love,” which Vance wants to mean hierarchically organized love — Herrenvolk love or America-first love, some multi-tiered approach that would redefine “love” as something that wouldn’t interfere with his stunted understanding of life as a giant game of musical chairs. The language comes from Aquinas and Augustine who extremely did not mean anything at all like what Vance wishes they meant.
Ultimately, Vance was responding to the commandment to “love your neighbor” by seeking loopholes, saying, “Ah, yes Lord, of course, but who is my neighbor?” Limit the definition of “neighbor” and you can thereby limit the obligation to love.
This is, of course, neither a new nor a particularly clever response, even though Vance seemed to imagine it was both.
Vance’s combination of smug arrogance and Extreme Wrongness — all in service of policies explicitly condemned by the Catholic church — earned him a shout-out from the bishop of Rome that was the ecclesiastical equivalent of the Billy Madison game-show meme:
Francis’s letter specifically rejected the specific ideas promoted by Vance, while prescribing a path to redemption for this sad little man desperately in need of it:
“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” Francis wrote in the letter.
The pope explained that Catholic charity isn’t just a series of concentric circles extending from the individual to family, friends and fellow citizens and ultimately the world, but it is centered on human dignity with a special concern for the poorest. Francis condemned ideologies that are first concerned with personal, community and national identity.
Prior to this direct-from-the-seat-of-St.-Peter missive, tens of thousands of Christians had already responded, incredulously, to Vance’s cramped inversion of the basics of the gospel by shouting “Hasn’t this guy ever read the parable of the Good Samaritan?” So it was nice for all of them that the pope himself then chimed in by saying, “I know, right? What’s with this guy?”
We will have much, much more to say about the substance and function of J.D. Vance’s Extreme Wrongness later. Here I just want to focus on the deliciousness of his failure here, and why Vance’s pseudo-theological arrogance backfired on him in a way that it doesn’t for the nondenominational Protestant theobros he imitates. That gang has built entire networks based on this Herrenvolk-love redefinition of “love your neighbor.” They’ve written whole libraries explicating the hierarchies of who we are and are not to love, of who is and is not our neighbor. And they’ve spent just as much energy redefining “love” to ensure that their followers don’t think of it as having anything to do with treating others well, or with hospitality, justice, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, etc.
Those theobros are mostly Extremely Reformed guys, but not so Reformed as to attach themselves to functioning denominations. They’re Reformed due to their inordinate enthusiasm for Limited Atonement, not due to any commitment to Reformed ecclesiology. They don’t have popes. They are popes. All of them. Or, at least, wanna-be popes.
Admittedly, this doesn’t afford them the veneer of authority that they would have speaking on behalf of a capital-C church, backed by centuries of tradition and large stone buildings, etc. “You must heed my teaching for I am pastor of a large-ish church, author of several sermon collections, and host of a moderately popular podcast!” doesn’t quite carry the same authoritative heft of Vance’s attempt to speak with the full weight of Catholic tradition and doctrine and a global religion with more than a billion adherents. But it also means that those nondenominational theobros are free to pontificate without any danger of getting in trouble with the actual pontiff.
If Vance were to begin to study or to understand actual Catholic doctrine — especially Catholic “social teaching” — he’d be horrified to learn what he’s signed up for. The guy would be much more at home with his nondenominational buds in the Very Online Reformed theme park of the theobros.
But I don’t think he’ll be able to give up his fantasy of speaking on behalf of, and with the stolen authority of, a massive denomination. Not even after the sting of that brutal papal smackdown.* He’s too much of a pedigree-chaser and too convinced that authority is something to be purchased rather than something to be earned. He’s more likely to suddenly declare himself Serbian Orthodox or some such than to leave the Catholic church to become nondenominational.
My guess is Vance will eventually wind up like Rod Dreher or Calvin Robinson — a serial convert always convinced that the next church will provide him enough second-hand ambient authority that people will finally have to view his self-obsessed, self-seeking selfishness as morally serious.
Or maybe, just maybe — it’s extremely unlikely, but maybe it could happen — Vance will start “meditating constantly on the parable of the Good Samaritan” and, instead of getting converted again and again, he’ll actually get saved.
* For the soundtrack to this post, the phrase “papal smackdown” should always be mentally sung to the tune of Europe’s jock-rock classic “Final Countdown.” Because that video is where Vance learned about eyeliner.
Then, if you don’t want a hair-band anthem stuck in your head, you can purge that by singing “You can be vice president / I’d rather be the pope.”
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