Order of Love or Just War?

Ripubblichiamo qui un intervento in lingua inglese del nostro Presidente Alberto Garzoni, apparso sul sito dell’Association for the Renewal of Catholic Political and Social Thought l’8 ottobre 2025.

In the late afternoon of 8th May, when the new Pope’s identity was revealed, commentators rushed to browse the social media accounts of former Cardinal Prevost, hoping to find some indication of his political leanings. Among what they retrieved was his retweet of an article which criticised J. D. Vance’s position on the doctrine of ordo amoris—supposedly, a sign that Pope Leo was ‘on the left’.

A few weeks earlier, on 29th January, the American Vice President had sparked controversy when, during an interview with Fox News, he had stated: ‘There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritise the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that’.

Perplexity and outrage mounted at his statement. Vance replied to a critical tweet by British former diplomat and writer Rory Stewart, arguing that his remarks were simply in line with the Catholic concept of ordo amoris, and left the argument at that.

Academics and political observers, however, did not; a range of voices emerged, claiming that the notion—meaning ‘order of love’ and indicating how Christian charity is supposed to shape different layers of the social order—was more complex than Vance’s words allowed one to appreciate.

Controversy over what ordo amoris really meant and, crucially, what implications it had for the American administration’s recent immigration policy was intense. It became even more so when Pope Francis intervened, albeit indirectly, by addressing the American bishops in a letter. In it, he reminded his American brothers that, while the ‘right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe’ was unshakeable, ‘the true ordo amoris’ is not to be understood as an ever-expanding circle of care but, rather, as an open-ended and universal form of fraternity.

While the Pope’s warning had to be couched in diplomatic terms, other critics picked at Vance’s claims with greater animosity—and depth. In her Catholic National Reporter piece, aptly titled ‘JD Vance Is Wrong’, Kat Armas remarked how Christian love should flow freely through social relations, without hierarchies, constraining binaries, or any other remnant of colonial ideology. This is the piece then-Cardinal Prevost retweeted.

Stephen Pope, writing for America: The Jesuit Review noted that Vance’s account of social responsibility and ordered care neglected an important fact—namely, that ‘at times the contingencies of life can require us to override our usual priorities’. In doing so, Pope noted that Vance’s rigid application of ordo amoris contradicted two of the most prominent theological authorities who had contributed to shaping that traditionally Catholic concept: Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas. The former, in Book 1 of On Christian Doctrine (27-28) had observed that the distribution of ‘equal love must entail a consideration of ‘place, time or any other circumstance’. The latter, in his Summa Theologiae (II-II, a. 31 q. 3) had warned that the usual requirements (time, place) to distribute love and support from the close to the far can be defied when circumstances of ‘extreme urgency’ require it.

Frederick Bauerschmidt and Maureen Sweeney, in their article on Church Life Journal, reinforced the idea that Vance’s approach would have betrayed the spirit of Aquinas’ paradigmatic understanding of the order of love. In particular, it would have failed to account for the fact that love-fuelled social support cannot be arranged as ‘a zero-sum game’. In their assessment, it should rather be extended as widely as possible.

Other reactions to Vance’s position were less damning. Philosopher of religion and Cambridge academic James Orr pointed out that Vance’s understanding of the order of love was consistent with the classically Stoic idea of oikeiosis or conciliatio, later acquired and re-interpreted by early Christian authors like St Augustine. That doctrine accounted for ‘society’s organic growth’ and progressive integration, from marriage to the city—the ‘ever-expanding circle of care’ which the late Pope Francis had refuted.

Orr contended that the American VP had been correct in another sense, too. His words reflected the idea that neighbours can be ‘our objects of care and attention’ precisely because they are proximate. This comment does seem to map onto Aquinas’ own teaching that we are ‘to love all our neighbours equally, as regards our affection, but not as regards the outward effect’, that is with respect to the social expression of that affection. The order of love, in fact, requires that the affection for one’s fellow citizens grows with their nearness, notwithstanding exceptions or cases of ‘extreme necessity’.

Eric Sammons, writing for Crisis, argued that Vance’s observations were also consistent with Catholic social teaching. He noted that the American Vice President had voiced a subsidiarity-infused ‘stewardship of national resources and responsibilities’. Concurrently, he mapped his attitude onto Pius XII’s magisterium and the 1992 Catechism (§2241), jointly highlighting the political right to regulate immigration and to mitigate its social effects with an emphasis on civic duties.

The American Solidarity Party, commenting on the controversy on Facebook, took this line of analysis one step further, arguing that the issue with the doctrine of ordo amoris is not one of principle, but of application: ‘which neighbor [sic] has the biggest moral claim on our attention is not always self-evident’. While globalisation compounds this difficulty, any debate on ordo amoris inevitably points to the struggle of striking a balance between solidarity and subsidiarity.

The Catholic magisterium has shown awareness of that tension as well. The pastoral guidelines issued in 2013 by the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, titled ‘Welcoming Christ’, and signed by Cardinals Sarah and Veglio, prove as much. On the one hand, the document affirms the right of individuals to migrate ‘under certain circumstances’, including the lack of the basic resources for sustainment and dignity (26). At the same time, it does so by quoting John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris and a 1942 radio message by Pius XII; interestingly, both evoke the Augustinian-and-Thomistic notion of ‘tranquillity of order’, which is akin to that of ‘order of love’, and suggest that the Church can hardly endorse any ‘particular and concrete’ policies aimed at resolving issues of internal order and international cooperation.

In short, one must contemplate the hypothesis that the American Solidarity Party might have been right: appealing to ordo amoris from a militantly Christian perspective might lead to an inevitable conceptual stalemate—and VP Vance would have fallen into it. What if we did take this hypothesis seriously? What alternatives would we have to think about migration policy in terms that are salient, more stringent, and still consistent with Catholic political thought?

16th-century Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria might offer us a thought-provoking prompt. While providing a nuanced rationale for the Spanish expeditions in the Americas, Vitoria combines issues of migration with just war ethics. He does so by arguing that ‘it is an act of war to bar those considered as enemies from entering a city or a country, or to expel them if they are already in it’. From this principle, he proceeds to claim that the native Americans have no right to repel the Spaniards insofar as ‘they [i.e. the Spaniards] are doing no harm’. Acting contrary to this principle amounts to violating the right of war, because it means illegitimately projecting the status of aggressors onto them. It also prevents the natural partnership or intercourse (communicatio) of individuals and nations (De Indis, 278).

Let us briefly apply this logic to the controversy generated by JD Vance. The American government is pursuing a radical policy of deportation and expulsion of illegal immigrants; Vance tried to justify that by appealing to such an ostensibly ambiguous principle as ordo amoris. If, alternatively, we followed Vitoria’s scheme, we could conclude that the American government can deport immigrants only if they are doing active harm to the communities they are de facto part of—if they are hostile to those communities. Establishing whether they are treated as enemies fairly requires, in turn, establishing conflict-related criteria; it requires, in other words, to rely on so-called just war theory.

Though this might sound odd, the consequences of choosing this framework would be vastly positive. With respect to the Catholic intellectual tradition, they would ground further conversations in a debate that reaches back to the Patristic era and, especially, to Augustine’s remarks on Christian war-waging. The scholarship there is well-developed and, therefore, potentially less exposed to terminological controversies and lack of sophistication.

This change of paradigm would favour an understanding of subsidiarity that revolves around allocating (or competing for) resources, empowering agents to excel in their specific tasks—that which the Catholic tradition calls a munus proprium—and binding communities from the inside (Mendoza 2024). It would also provide an effective platform to conceive of civil society as depending on a distribution of vocations and duties (munera) and organic relationships (conversationes) (Hittinger 2002).

Finally, complementing an ordo amoris-based approach to migration policies with a just-war one might be effective in protecting the rights of migrants themselves: if you cannot be construed as a harmful enemy, you cannot be forced to leave lawfully. That would also apply to the recurrent rumours of remigration that are going through much of Europe. Whether and how such criteria can ever reflect the traditional standards of just war—just cause, last resort, proportionality, legitimate authority, discrimination of ‘belligerents’—and deployed strictly to protect the human dignity of all parties involved is perhaps a question for the next debate. Much of the Western social order might depend on it.

Alberto Garzoni

Scholarly Sources

§ Francis Russell HITTINGER, Social Roles and Ruling Virtues in Catholic Social Doctrine, ‘Annales Theologici’ 16 (2002), 385-408.

§ Cristian MENDOZA, The Principle of Subsidarity: Overcoming Market and State Priorities, in: Martin SCHLAG and Boglárka KOLLER, Rethinking Subsidarity: Multidisciplinary Reflections on the Catholic Social Tradition (London: Springer, 2024).

§ Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People and Pontifical Council Cor Unum, Welcoming Christ in Refugees and Forcibly Displaced Persons: Pastoral Guidelines (Vatican City: Vatican City Press, 2013).

§ Francisco de VITORIA, Vitoria: Political Writings, edited and translated by Anthony PAGDEN and Jeremy LAWRANCE, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Press Articles (URLs)

§ Kat ARMAS, JD Vance Is Wrong: Jesus Doesn’t Ask Us to Rank Our Love for Others, ‘National Catholic Reporter’, 1st February 2025: https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/jd-vance-wrong-jesus-doesnt-ask-us-rank-our-love-others.

§ Frederick BAUERSCHMIDT and Maureen SWEENEY, Ordo Amoris: Wisely Extending Love, ‘First Things’, 6th February 2025: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/ordo-amoris-wisely-extending-love.

§ James ORR, J.D. Vance States the Obvious about Ordo Amoris, ‘First Things’, 31st January 2025: https://firstthings.com/jd-vance-states-the-obvious-about-ordo-amoris/.

§ Stephen POPE, The Problem with JD Vance’s Theology of ‘Ordo Amoris’—and Its Impact on Policy, ‘America: The Jesuit Review’, 13th February 2025: https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2025/02/13/ordo-amoris-stephen-pope-vance-249926/.

§ Eric SAMMONS, The Sacred Order of Love: Defending J.D. Vance’s Ordo Amoris, ‘Crisis Magazine’, 3rd February 2025: https://crisismagazine.com/editors-desk/the-sacred-order-of-love-defending-j-d-vances-ordo-amoris.