Happy Ordo Amoris Day
By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 14, 2025
Happy Valentine’s Day, Catholic Culture readers! For your gift this year, I reached out to some of the biggest names in Catholicism and asked them to join me in wishing you all the love in the world. And did they ever oblige.
Free eBook:
|
| Free eBook: Practical Theology |
Here’s one:
And another:
And my personal favorite:
Ok, no, those are memes posted by a friend on Facebook. But I’m sure you know what they are getting at. Pope Francis sent a letter to the U.S. Bishops this week declaring the Trump Administration’s immigration policy incompatible with Catholic social teaching and directly rebuking Vice President JD Vance in all but name for his invocation of the “ordo amoris” to defend that policy:
Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. 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.
By now, nearly everyone has commented on it. The most significant of them was not any Catholic magazine writer or YouTube podcaster, but U.S. “border czar” Tom Homan himself, who essentially told the Pope to go pound sand. That was to be expected. Those who would care about the Pope’s letter do care—many of them in fervent disagreement with the Holy Father. But the people Rome hopes to influence do not care. In that sense, the Pope putting out this statement was a lose-lose for the Church. That was the point with which Catholic Culture’s Phil Lawler opened and closed his piece. Also noteworthy was Rusty Reno’s big-picture analysis, putting the Pope’s words in the wider context of the struggle between globalism and populism, and showing how the Holy Father’s almost-unqualified support for mass immigration disadvantages the poor in the recipient countries:
Pope Francis claims to be taking the side of the vulnerable, but his rhetoric aligns with attitudes and statements characteristic of progressive elites...Mass migration concerns more than economic dislocations for working-class citizens of Western countries. As voters increasingly recognize, as numbers increase, society is transformed. Populism in the United States represents a reaction against this transformation. It’s a call for the reconsolidation of national identity, a demand that elites serve their fellow citizens and promote a shared civic culture, not a seemingly superior cosmopolitanism that conveniently aligns with elite interests and excuses them from the need to make sacrifices for the sake of the nation.
For my part, the most striking thing was the Pope’s direct intervention in U.S. politics. Put aside for the moment the underlying issue, in this case illegal immigration, and consider how unprecedented were Pope Francis’ actions. Many of the commentators of the past week mentioned it as part of a larger analysis. I thought it was the biggest aspect of it all, the part most in need of deeper reflection.
Imagine, for instance, if the Pope—any Pope, going back 40 years—had issued a letter to the U.S. Bishops rebuking a high-profile Democrat for misusing the Catholic understanding of “conscience” to justify being pro-abortion. And doing it less than two weeks after the Democrat uttered the word, as Pope Francis did to Vice President Vance’s use of “ordo amoris!” I cannot recall so direct and blatant a papal intervention in U.S. politics in my lifetime. The many pro-life statements by Pope St. John Paul II, always articulated in terms of general principles and never singling out anyone, as Francis did here (albeit not by name), don’t even come close.
But what if they had? What if Pope St. John Paul II had shot down Mario Cuomo right away after his 1984 Notre Dame University speech creating the specious foundation for pro-choice Catholic politicians? What if Pope Benedict had issued so direct a rebuke to President Obama’s assault on the real conscience rights of the Little Sisters of the Poor? What if Pope Francis had told President Biden and Speaker Pelosi, “No, actually, you have misrepresented Catholic teaching on conscience”? Where might we be right now? Might the attack on our faith have gotten as bad as it did by the end of the Biden era? Might it even have caused the attacks to level off and thus deprive the Trump movement of some of the oxygen that fueled its return to power?
I think especially of Connecticut’s own Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, who sent open letters to Pope Benedict XVI, co-signed by every pro-abortion Democrat in Congress, lecturing the Pope himself on Catholicism and conscience and public life, and how the Pope was threatening these things merely by articulating Church teaching. She never got a rebuke from Rome. And in her case, this was not merely some misrepresentation of Catholic teaching. Rather, it was an act of aggression by an entire American political party against the Pope on the Pope’s own territory, the articulation of Catholic teaching on faith and morals. It was met with silence.
But at the end of the day, it is the Pope who speaks on these matters with greater authority than any of the rest of us. So how are we who disagree with the Pope’s application of Catholic Social Teaching in this matter to respond?
We start, first of all, with that acknowledgement of legitimate authority, as CatholicVote did. We try to understand the Holy Father’s thinking by listening to his best interpreters, such as Fr. Raymond de Souza here and here.
And we square the circle wherever we can. In that sense, Fr. Clinton Sensat seems to have found a way forward. Writing on his own Facebook, Fr. Sensat says: “the ordo amoris stands, and I see nothing whatsoever in VP Vance’s comments which are irreconcilable with the pope’s.” When pressed on the point, Fr. Sensat responds thusly:
[B]ecause Vance was clear that it [Vance’s citing of order amoris] doesn’t mean a lack of love for anyone. Pope Francis seems to be concerned that ordo amoris can be used to exclude some from love. But Vance explicitly negated that. Greater love for those closest, at least in terms of the effects of love, IS a Christian concept, and is present throughout Scripture. I think the pope and the VP are just talking past each other here. There’s nothing actually contradictory in their thought, though there might be some in their intuitive feelings.
That’s about as good as it’s going to get. At least for now. As for the long term, it seems to me that just as it took Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict to clear up what Vatican II did and did not mean, it must fall to some future Pope to say “Pope Francis did mean this, Pope Francis did not mean that.” On the present controversy and on so many others.
Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.
All comments are moderated. To lighten our editing burden, only current donors are allowed to Sound Off. If you are a current donor, log in to see the comment form; otherwise please support our work, and Sound Off!
