The ‘ordo amoris’ and the bottom line

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 20, 2025

Thanks to Vice President J. D. Vance—with a strong assist from Pope Francis , the concept of the ordo amoris has been much in the news this month. Unfortunately, as so often happens when politicians dabble in theology, and vice versa, the discussion has produced more heat than light.

Now that the debate has cooled a bit—the Catholic apologists anxious to denounce Vance have had their say—let’s review the discussion.

It all began when, in FoxNews interview, in answer to a question about having compassion on immigrants, Vance replied:

[As] an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders.

Take note of that last sentence. Vance does not suggest that Americans should despise migrants and refugees, or deny them compassion; he says that our fellow citizens should take priority. In that same interview he went on to explain what he called an “old-school concept”:

… 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 and prioritize the rest of the world.

When a British politician (looking beyond his own borders, evidently) criticized that common-sense approach as “bizarre,” Vance responded online by suggesting: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’”

The concept of ordo amoris has a rich history in Catholic teaching, having been expounded by Sts. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. As Vance said at the outset, it does not imply dismissing the needs of people in other countries. It does mean showing charity first for those who have a special claim.

In what can only be seen as a response to Vance, Pope Francis wrote: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.” That would, indeed, be a simplistic interpretation of the concept.

Yet the idea that a Christian’s duty of compassion builds up in “concentric circles” is not wrong. In fact Pope Francis himself has used the “concentric” image several times. (If it is true, as widely suspected, that the Pontiff did not write that letter himself, one might wonder whether the ghost-writer was trying to correct previous papal statements.) Kenneth Craycraft observed in Our Sunday Visitor:

Pope Francis has said similar things in prior letters and other documents. In a 2109 letter a to the Pontifical Academy for Life, he affirms the teaching of Pope St. Paul VI that “the Church family extends in concentric circles to all men and women, even to those who consider themselves extraneous to the faith and the worship of God” (No. 7). In a 2021 homily, Pope Francis notes that the unity of Christians can be imagined as “unity consisting of three concentric rings,” namely, abiding in Jesus, unity with Christians, and then the “third circle of unity … the whole of humanity.” And in a 2019 audience, the pope noted that reconciliation “takes the form of concentric circles, starting from the heart and extending to the universe—but in reality it starts from the heart of God, from the heart of Christ.”

St. John Henry Newman explained the concept with his characteristic elegance in a sermon on “Love of Relations and Friends,” which is found in the invaluable collection of his Pastoral and Plain Sermons, where he describes the love of family and friends—of those in the first concentric circle, if you will—“as the source of more extended Christian love.” He explains:

Now God’s merciful Providence has in the natural course of things narrowed for us at first this large field of duty; He has given us a clue. We are to begin with loving our friends about us, and gradually to enlarge the circle of our affections, till it reaches all Christians, and then all men. Besides, it is obviously impossible to love all men in any strict and true sense. What is meant by loving all men, is, to feel well-disposed to all men, to be ready to assist them, and to act towards those who come in our way, as if we loved them. We cannot love those about whom we know nothing…

In other words, the practice of charity, developed by caring for those who are closest to us, prepares us to extend that charity further. In a recent article in Church Life Journal, Frederick Bauerschmidt and Maureen Sweeney make the same point, saying that “the impetus of Christian love, as understood by Aquinas, ought to widen the scope of our concern to encompass even those who might seem distant or unlovable.”

Still this compassion and concern must be concrete rather than theoretical. As Cardinal Newman observes, we can only feel genuine love for “those who come in our way.” With that understanding of the ordo amoris, one might make a distinction between the unknown number of potential migrants who might want to come to the US and those who are already living here, perhaps literally as our neighbors.

In the online debate of the past few weeks, the critics of Vice President Vance almost invariably invoke the parable of the Good Samaritan to show the more expansive definition of what it means to see someone as one’s neighbor. So it is. The man who was beaten and robbed on the road to Jericho had no claim on the Samaritan, until the Samaritan came upon him on that road. Then, having encountered the man, the Samaritan recognizes treated him like a neighbor. Even then the Samaritan does not make the battered man his permanent ward. He provides for his immediate needs, generously pays to help the man get back on his feet, and then he leaves—to go about his own affairs.

Moreover the Samaritan helps the crime victim at his own expense, not imposing on anyone else. The parable would read quite differently if the money that he gave to the innkeeper was money that the Samaritan himself needed to feed his own family that night. He extended the circle of his compassion, to be sure; but he did not thereby impose new burdens on those who had a prior claim on his concern.

Implicit in Vance’s idea of the ordo amoris, obviously, is the understanding that a government’s first duty is to its own citizens. Raising taxes (and other costs) on citizens, in order to help non-citizens, is not an act of charity toward the citizens. And it is by fulfilling our first duties in charity, toward those closest to us, that we learn how best to act charitably toward others.