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Love Ordered and Disordered

Love Ordered and Disordered

Last updated on: August 13, 2026 at 1:08 pm by Edwin Woodruff Tait

Love Ordered and Disordered 2026-08-13T13:08:58-05:00 Edwin Woodruff Tait

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National Library of Poland, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

“Ordo Caritatis” is Not the Problem

In an earlier post I explained why I can’t agree with those who simply dismiss the Thomistic concept of the “order of love” invoked last year by Vice President Vance. Vance invoked the concept to defend the Trump administration’s policies toward immigrants and its generally nationalist stance. Understandably, many Catholic commentators reacted simply by affirming the universality of the call to Christian love.

As I argued in my last post, though, this is inadequate because there are good grounds to accept the basic concept of the order of love.A better approach is to show how Vance was distorting the concept of the “order of love” to justify an immoral nationalism. Last year, one example of such an approach was Stephen Pope’s excellent piece in America. Given the continuing abominations of this administration, the subject is worth revisiting.

God and Neighbor

As I showed in the previous post, the “order of love” is fundamentally about one’s love for God as the supreme good and one’s desire for union with God. In Catholic ethics (in contrast to some Protestant ethics), there is nothing “selfish” about such a desire for union with God, although of course sheer delight in God’s goodness and beauty should be primary. Next to that primary love for God, we love our neighbors and desire that they too may be united to God. (Important note: Thomas Aquinas points out repeatedly that the order of knowing is the reverse of the order of being. We know God reflected in creation. So our knowledge of the neighbor is prior to our knowledge of God, but a fully informed and conscious and properly ordered love places God first as the ultimate source and end of all created good.)

Finite and Infinite Goods

Vance’s invocation of the “order of love” refers to an ordering of love among fellow human beings — choosing which others to prioritize. Not only that, but it refers to love for one’s neighbor with regard to “temporal” goods, goods which do not last and are not infinite. That’s important, because finite goods are competitive. If we are in a famine and I have five potatoes left, every potato I give away to someone outside my family is a potato my own kids don’t get to eat.

But the ultimate good, union with God, isn’t like that. Not only is God’s goodness not limited, but we know it in and through one another. So the more you share in the goodness of God, the more clearly I can see and share in that goodness. That’s why prioritizing one’s own participation in God does not harm the neighbor. The closer I am to God, the more clearly I can show God’s goodness to others.

Sacrificing the Temporal for the Eternal

Hence, Aquinas says that it may often be right to give up one’s own earthly goods for the benefit of the neighbor. St. Maximilian Kolbe, for instance, who traded places with someone the Nazis had decided to kill, was not acting against his own good. By giving up his life, he shared more fully–as fully, the Christian tradition claims, as anyone possibly can–in the eternal, non-competitive, radiant goodness of God which is the only true happiness for all of us.

The Logic of Scarcity

Of course, this theological grounding for the order of love is not directly relevant to the political questions Vance was addressing. I’m sure that Vance would agree with everything I have just said. But by leaping to the distribution of earthly goods, he was distorting the nature of the traditional Christian ordo caritatis.

If our primary point of reference is eternal goods, which are infinite and non-competitive, that should shape how we approach earthly goods. Vance starts from an assumption of scarcity: we have only so much care and so many resources to go around, so we should prioritize those closest to us. This means that the way we think about earthly things will be fundamentally different from the way we think theologically about the ultimate good. In other words, Vance is approaching the question of how we treat immigrants from a fundamentally godless, secular perspective. He may be speaking of an order of love, but he is emphatically not speaking of charity at all in the traditional Christian sense of the term.

In the Light of Eternity

When we apply charity to earthly, limited goods, we should always do so with reference to eternity. How can we make the infinite goodness of God shine as clearly as possible through the limited, finite goods of this tragic, broken world? Our starting and ending point is, as Fr. Martin and the Pope rightly observed, the call to universal love, to will that all human beings share with us in God’s goodness. And that means that we should be very slow to exclude anyone from the circle of our care and concern.

Our starting assumptions will shape our practical judgments. If we start with the assumption that we can love only a few people and must exclude many, we aren’t likely to be very ingenious in finding ways to include as many people as possible. And this is what happens in the immigration debate all the time. There’s no clear, indisputable evidence that admitting more immigrants will harm Americans. Whether people think it will seems to depend largely on their assumptions about how the world works. Do we live in a world where it is feasible to try to make the radiance of non-competitive charity shine even in our political decisions? Or do we live in a world so corrupted by sin that the best we can do politically is to carve out boundaries and defend those for whom we are responsible against the threat posed by others?

Spiritualizing Charity

In my earlier post on the order of charity, I drew a link between rejecting that order and the Protestant Reformation. But I can also argue that Vance’s interpretation of the order of charity is rooted in a different aspect of the Protestant heritage. His critics agree with the idealistic side of Protestant teaching–total disinterested benevolence.

But the more “conservative” application of Protestantism goes in a different direction. The idealism, in this strand of Protestantism, is bracketed off as a “spiritual” matter. Those responsible for earthly order are expected to behave in thoroughly “worldly” ways, punishing the wicked and protecting the innocent. Charity, forgiveness, God’s preferential love for the poor and lowly- all of these things are for individual Christians or the Church as a community to emphasize. The government’s job has nothing to do with these things. Not all conservative Protestants go this far, of course. But it’s a theme you hear in many conservative criticisms of “the left.” And many Catholics, including Vance, speak this way as well.

The Ambiguities of Depravity

The harshness of much conservative Protestant politics is rooted in the Augustinian view that the human will is fundamentally “turned in on itself.” Or, in its classic Protestant articulation, “total depravity.” In both Augustine and the classical Protestant traditions that build on him, this conviction of the depth of human sinfulness can take one of two forms (sometimes both at once). It can lead to a revolutionary critique of the structures of human power as defined by sin. But it can also justify harsh measures to repress sin and preserve order. In some Protestant versions, it can even justify actions that we all recognize as sinful, because the world is so sinful that love of neighbor forces us to sacrifice our “moral purity” on the altar of love of neighbor. Reinhold Niebuhr’s defense of nuclear deterrence explicitly appealed to Augustinian doctrines of sin. Many Christians defend immoral actions in war along these lines.

The Impossible Standard as an Excuse for Cynicism

The cynical and idealistic strands of Protestantism often coexist. One of the reasons Protestants historically had such a radical view of human depravity is that they defined true goodness as a completely unselfish love of neighbor. They set up an impossible standard and then condemned all humans for not meeting it, and this was a feature, not a bug. If everything we do is sinful, then it becomes easier to justify “necessary” actions that violate moral norms.

I don’t want to scapegoat Protestantism. There is much that is admirable about Protestant traditions of moral reasoning, and Catholics have certainly committed awful acts and found twisted ways to justify them. But in choosing to become Catholic, I was guided in part by my perception that Catholic moral and social teaching has a greater coherence and integrity than I found available within Protestantism. I still think this. And that’s why Vance’s perversion of Catholic teaching to justify the violation of moral norms toward immigrants enrages me.

Nationality is Not Everything

There is, finally, a much simpler and less abstruse reason why Vance is wrong. The Ordo Caritatis does say that some people are closer to us than others, and that we are more responsible for them. But Vance interprets this “closeness” primarily in terms of citizenship in a nation-state. He then gives the degree of relationship priority over factors such as the extremity of a person’s need. Both of these moves are unwarranted.

Aquinas says that we have to consider three things when deciding how to allocate limited resources in the service of charity: the person’s inherent merits or status, the person’s need, and our relationship to the person. The most overriding consideration is need. A person starving to death will always take precedence over someone who has relatively less pressing needs. Aquinas gives a lot more weight to social status than most of us would today (I hope). For instance, he thinks that people from upper-class backgrounds have more sensitive bodies and need better food. Also, more defensibly, he argues that people responsible for many others receive priority. He also sees moral character as playing a role — all else being equal, it’s better to give your food to a good person than to a bad one.

In short, for Aquinas, how closely we are related to a person is only one factor to be considered, and not necessarily the most important. And national identity (being a “fellow citizen”) is only one factor and relevant primarily in certain specific contexts (war, for instance).

Who is My Neighbor?

This brings us back to the example that Vance’s Catholic critics last year rightly cited as decisive: the Good Samaritan. The man who fell among thieves was the Samaritan’s neighbor, even though he belonged to a different nationality. He was a neighbor because he was right there, in front of him, in need. The proper application of the ordo caritatis does not allow us to confine our love within ideological or national boundaries. It calls us, above all, to love the people who present themselves to us in need. When people come to our border, or even cross it illegally due to the urgency of their need, they become our neighbors in the sense intended by Jesus. They are, in every relevant moral sense, extremely close to us.

Hence, it’s not necessary to reject the concept of the “ordo caritatis” in order to condemn Vance’s use of the idea. On the contrary, taking the “ordo caritatis” tradition seriously helps us understand how appalling his perversion of that tradition is.

Image: Gustave Dore, “Rosa Celeste.”

Alighieri, Dante; Cary, Henry Francis (ed) (1892) “Canto XXXI” in The Divine Comedy by Dante, Illustrated, Complete, London, Paris & Melbourne: Cassell & Company. Retrieved on 13 July 2009.

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