What are the boundaries of Christian love? And how should our answer to this question influence policy on immigration and other critical issues at this moment in the US and beyond? In a Fox News interview with J.D. Vance, the Vice President of the United States, offered the following take on Christian love in relation to President Trump’s immigration policies:
As an American leader, but also as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. That doesn’t mean you hate people from the outside of your own borders, but there’s this old-school [concept]—and I think it’s a very Christian concept by the way—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. (January 30, 2025)
In discussing these policies, J.D. Vance brought up the Augustinian and Thomistic principle of the order of love—ordo amoris—whereby a Christian’s call to love is organized into ever expanding circles or spheres of contact and care beginning with those closest to us by accident of family, geographic region, or nationality. Vance’s presentation of this concept implied that Christian love is a bounded category, limited in its reach, as in a pie that only has so many slices to go around. According to Vance, Christians in the U.S. should understand that our love must first extend to care for U.S. citizens, and then, if anything is left over, to extend to those who are either living beyond our borders or living within them though not as citizens. Trump’s orders for mass detention and deportation of persons in the country illegally are presumably designed to target only those with criminal records and criminal charges that pose a threat to U.S. citizens (though we now know these policies are impacting a much broader population of immigrants).
Vance’s words drew a slew of commentary that broke down the concept of the ordo amoris from a myriad of perspectives. Some excellent analyses include Tisha Rajendra, who took to Bluesky to do a thorough rundown of Vance’s confused and inaccurate reading of the concept in light of Aquinas’s much broader understanding of love and justice, one that calls for priorities shaped by the dire humanitarian need of persons to whom we may not be related by birth or nationality. Also relevant is Matthew Shadle’s extensive commentary on his blog, Window Light. In “Getting Love Right: J.D. Vance and the Ordo Amoris,” Shadle thoroughly reviews a spectrum of clarifying responses from ethicists and theologians, and provides context on the issue of migrant justice in Catholic social teaching. In America Magazine, Terence Sweeney reminded us that the ordering of love has its origin in St. Augustine, stating that, “What Mr. Vance gets wrong is that the point of Christian teaching is to expand, even transform, our order of loves. If our explanations of Christianity do not ‘build up this double love of God and neighbor,’ as Augustine writes in On Christian Doctrine, then we have failed to understand Christianity.” And Stephen Pope, an Aquinas scholar, explained that in Aquinas the order of love is a framework that is grounded in God’s love for all creation. For Pope, “No true Catholic ethic relegates mass numbers of distant suffering neighbors to the outer periphery of our moral concern. The fact that we cannot love every neighbor ‘in the same way and to the same degree,’ as Mr. Reno rightly notes, does not justify loving only our own people and ignoring the rest of humanity.… Such a love, in Christian terms, is anything but properly ordered.”
The Catholic Church and the Rights of Migrants
Pope Francis’s response to Vance’s take on the ordo amoris appeared in his “Letter of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops of the United States of America, February 10, 2025:
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.
In the letter the pontiff places migration front and center as a preeminent issue of the current moment: “The journey from slavery to freedom that the People of Israel traveled, [] invites us to look at the reality of our time, so clearly marked by the phenomenon of migration, as a decisive moment in history to reaffirm not only our faith in a God who is always close, incarnate, migrant, and refugee, but also the infinite and transcendent dignity of every human person” (1). In this letter the Pope goes so far as to declare that protection of human dignity, including the dignity of migrant persons, “surpasses and sustains every other juridical consideration that can be made to regulate life in society” (3). Summarizing much of Catholic social teaching on the rights of migrants and refugees, Francis reminds the church in the United States specifically to do no further harm to already vulnerable persons who “have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment…” (4)
Lamenting the lack of compassion and dignity at the borders, Pope Francis’s 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti offers an ordering of political love that lifts up the gift of encountering the other, the migrant, and other persons on the move.
Indeed, while Catholic social teaching has historically affirmed the right of nations to sustain and defend their borders, the right of persons to migrate holds a special priority, as evidenced by the lengthy history of support for migrants and refugees in Catholic teaching. Moved by the waves of refugees after the 1914 earthquake in Sicily, Pope Pius X declared the World Day of Migrants and Refugees to be celebrated yearly on the last Sunday in September. Since then, Catholic social teaching has honored the plight of migrants throughout its documentary heritage. Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (1965), for example, affirms the right of people to freedom of movement within their own country and to emigrate to other countries when the conditions make such moves necessary. In 2003 the U.S. and Mexican bishops, in their joint statement Strangers no Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope, stated that, “While recognizing the right of the sovereign state to control its borders [] this right is not absolute…” (30) Citing the 1952 document Exsul Familia: On the Spiritual Care of Migrants, the U.S. and Mexican bishops reiterate that the sovereignty of the state “cannot be exaggerated to the point that access to this land is, for inadequate of unjustified reasons, denied to needy and decent people from other nations.” (a portion of the document that in turn refers to a 1948 message from Pius XII to the American Bishops)
Lamenting the lack of compassion and dignity at the borders, Pope Francis’s 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti offers an ordering of political love that lifts up the gift of encountering the other, the migrant, and other persons on the move as important contributions of cultural and economic talent to the receiving country. In Fratelli Tutti, Francis observes that there continue to be people “who appear to feel encouraged or at least permitted by their faith to support varieties of narrow and violent nationalism, xenophobia and contempt, and even the mistreatment of those who are different” (86).
The Framing of Migration Narratives
Indeed, what the current Trump administration labels as “an invasion“—a term that frames migrant flows as a form of aggression against the United States, justifying the use of military force mainly at the Southern border with Mexico—is part of a longer-standing, historical trend in the movement of people. In her 2016 chapter “The Making of Migrations,” sociologist Saskia Sassen carefully details the various forces driving global migration patterns. Migration flows, she demonstrates, follow cross-border relationships established by various mechanisms, primarily colonial, economic, and military. Sassen describes the significant impact on migration flows of U.S. foreign policy and economic activity from the 1950s–80s thusly: “This central military, political, and economic role contributed both to the creation of conditions that mobilized people into migrations, whether local or international, and to the formation of links with the United States that subsequently were to serve as unintended bridges for international migration.” (13) Migration streams do not represent an invasion. More often than not they follow extractivist and interventionist policies that connect geographies across international borders. An immediately recent example of this phenomenon is the flow of Haitian and Afghan asylum seekers and refugees into the U.S., flows that directly develop from the U.S.’s military activity in these countries, especially the war on terror after September 11, 2001. Rather than speaking about immigrants as bands of aggressors in a cross-border feud, language about migration patterns ought to acknowledge the heavy footprint left behind by the extractivist imperial, colonial, and military presence of the United States across the globe. As Pope Francis suggests in Fratelli Tutti, our governmental policies and processes must exhibit some sense of memory, “Nowadays, it is easy to be tempted to turn the page, to say that all these things happened long ago and we should look to the future. For God’s sake, no! We can never move forward without remembering the past; we do not progress without an honest and unclouded memory” (249).
The language of “invasion,” an expedient and dangerous term, is not unique in its demonization of foreign, specifically Brown and Black persons. The detention and deportation industrial complex serves the U.S.’s historical urge to control and contain Black and Brown persons. Architectures of hate construct holding spaces for humans considered criminal by virtue of their skin color or citizenship status. The prison and detention industrial complex has ensured that one in three black men born before 2001, and one in five born since, will experience incarceration of some kind in their lifetime. The captivity of black and brown persons in the U.S. is part of an egregious economic network in which private companies charge billions of dollars yearly to the U.S. government for holding Black and Brown persons who often perform free labor. This network generates even more revenue by fleecing prisoners, detainees, and their families in their attempt to meet basic human needs, for example to maintain hygiene by obtaining toiletries and communicate with the outside world on the phone. Due to Trump’s mass deportation policy, the U.S. is now in the business of also establishing private detention facilities in places such as Panama and Costa Rica, as well as utilizing detention facilities in Guantánamo. To the already inhumane treatment of migrants that includes family separation, a beyond sluggish immigration court system, the processing of minors without representation, we now add deportation to third countries and indefinite detention therein. Imprisoning people in this way adds to the inhumanity because it puts many deportees not from these regions in foreign locations with no knowledge about their prospects or their final destination, amounting to another form of human trafficking. Of significant concern is the trafficking of deportees to El Salvador to be housed in the country’s recently built mega-prison. The Salvadoran prison system is already under severe scrutiny for safety violations, lack of due process, and placing minors in harm’s way. It is not fit for housing deportees.
Aquinas on Christian Love – “It’s complicated”
No reading of Christian love can ever make it acceptable to deport persons with full dignity and worth to be detained in mega-prisons in El Salvador or private detention encampments in Panama, or in a base in Guatánamo. Aquinas scholar Frederick Bauerschmidt and attorney Maureen Sweeney state that for Aquinas the dire need of a stranger can in fact make a moral claim on us that surpasses our responsibility to those closest to us. “The ordo amoris does not mean that proximity always trumps urgent need,” they declare. “Rather, prudent people must be allowed to make judgments in complex situations” (ST, II-II, Q.31, a.3, ad.1). Vance misses the mark on the order of Christian love in Aquinas on two fronts. First, how we negotiate our care of others in urgent need, in complex situations, and with limited resources is very much a matter of prudence, that is, we are meant to evaluate facts about the conditions of need and our capacity for compassionate responses against various categories and responsibilities. Catholic social teaching has sought to infuse prudence into considerations of the care of migrants by prioritizing the principle of human dignity above the rights of borders in its 130-year tradition. At the heart of this tradition is the overwhelming prioritization given to the welfare of migrants and the stranger in the Bible. Second, Aquinas’s treatment of virtues such as justice, prudence, and love in the Summa sits between Aquinas’s exposition on the nature of God and Creation on one end, and his exposition on the Incarnation and the Sacraments as signs of God’s unbounded, expansive, and redeeming love, on the other. The measure of Christian love is not a set of boundaries around specific kinds of people, but, rather, the gift of God’s crossing all boundaries through the Incarnation.
Contrary to being a formula for how to clinically calculate what we owe others most connected to us, Aquinas’s ordo amoris is an invitation to prudently discern how to imitate God’s love in a fractured and hurting world. As Shadle suggests, for Pope Francis, “our concern for migrants and refugees is a manifestation of the preferential option for the poor and vulnerable.” This, too, requires careful consideration of the concrete needs of vulnerable persons in our midst, all equally endowed with dignity and infinite worth. Prudence in this case ought to energize our political imagination, challenging it to consider the costs—financial, but also moral and spiritual—of militarizing borders, detentions, and deportations, against the costs of investing in the gift of the newcomer, in housing initiatives, in fast-track asylum processes, and other ways of extending political love to migrants, as Francis suggests we do in Fratelli Tutti. The ordo amoris does not free us from the moral claims that deported migrants stranded in a hotel-turned-detention center in Panama, for example, make on us via the grounds of Christian love. In fact, it binds us to them. No weaponization of Christian love for a political agenda can free us from this responsibility. In Christian love there is, in fact, as St. Augustine had declared, “no one in the whole human family to whom we do not owe love…” Unbounded.
