Vatican newspaper enters discussion of ordo amoris

January 17, 2026

The Vatican newspaper has published a contribution to the discussion of the meaning of ordo amoris [order of love], nearly a year after US Vice President JD Vance spoke about the concept and Pope Francis wrote about it in a letter to the bishops of the United States.

In “Farsi «attivamente prossimi» dell’altro: L’«ordo amoris» visto da una prospettiva biblica“ [Becoming “actively close” to the other: The “ordo amoris” seen from a biblical perspective], Father Jean-Pierre Sonnet, SJ, examined the parable of the Good Samaritan and other biblical passages.

Father Sonnet, a professor of Sacred Scripture at the Pontifical Gregorian University, concluded:

The ordo amoris is not that of a hierarchy, of a series of obligations in descending order from a moral point of view. The ordo amoris is a circulation between two poles: that of the neighbor and that of the one far away; that of the neighbor by default (the son, the daughter, the spouse, the wife, the husband) and that of the neighbor ‘through excess.’ The exchange between the two poles is the phenomenon that matters.

These dynamics are observed in human experience. But Christ is the one who catalyzes them in history, until his coming at the end of time. He is the one who makes men neighbors and brothers.

And he does so in a unique way in the Eucharistic mystery. The Eucharist is in fact the place of a shortcut: in the body and flesh of Christ presented, all those for whom it is necessary to act in the human family are made present.

Father Sonnet’s article was originally published in La Civilta Cattolica, the Jesuit journal for which he is Belgian correspondent. L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, published excerpts of the article in its January 15 edition.

 

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Further information:

• Farsi «attivamente prossimi» dell’altro: L’«ordo amoris» visto da una prospettiva biblica (L'Osservatore Romano, 1/15/26)