The maxim that “love begins at home” found a systematization in medieval theologians, the “ordo amoris“, according to which the Christian must love everyone, friends and enemies, without exclusion, but in an orderly way, beginning with those closest by ties of blood, neighborliness and friendship, then come those of the same people and the same country. And so on.
The Jews understood it this way in the Scriptures and still understand it today, even if the Bible never tires of reminding them that Israel was a nomadic and foreign people and therefore has an obligation to help “others”. In the same way, love for “others” requires, in the Gospel, that we also love our enemies, but not in preference to “our own”. However, Jesus taught us to love all those who “here and now” need our love.
The theology of the order of love was used by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert, to justify the mass deportations of illegal immigrants, ordered by Presbyterian Donald Trump, as if to say: we love them, yes, but far from here, because we love our people more.
The response to this argument was not long in coming: first the Catholic bishops and recently Pope Francis, through a letter addressed to the U.S. bishops, corrected the “theology” of J.D. Vance: ” Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that gradually extend to other persons and groups. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is the one we discover by constantly meditating on the parable of the Good Samaritan. That is, meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, no one excluded.” In short, a selective love, which loves our own “against” the other, is not Christian love.
You don’t need to be a fortune teller to predict that relations between the two, Francis and Donald, will not be harmonious, as they were not in Trump’s first term, when the pope went so far as to say that anyone who builds a wall to keep migrants out instead of bridges “is not a Christian.” Francis reiterates in the cited Letter: “The act of deporting people, who in many cases have left their land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, wounds the dignity of so many men and women, of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.” And he continues: “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the basis of the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, badly begins and badly will end.”
In turn, the courageous episcopal bishop Marianne Edgar Budde asked the new president to show compassion in the exercise of power, causing the tycoon’s ill-concealed displeasure.
And it’s not just about deportations, it’s about all U.S. humanitarian aid: USAID, WHO, emergencies.
It is well known that American Catholics constitute a mostly conservative community, which has seen in Trump a champion of anti-abortionism, religious freedom, the traditional family and the curb on “woke” culture, the plague of our times. This sympathy, which had a powerful influence on the election result, is ready to forget the series of anti-Christian values personified by its current president: the scandalous testimony of his life, the cult of wealth, reflected in the unprecedented ruling plutocracy, and the abandonment of the values that for two millennia have indelibly forged the “ordo valorum“” of the West: humility, forgiveness, compassion, solidarity, human dignity, detachment from wealth and, above all, love for the truth.