Ordo Amoris
A Call for Dangerous Unselfishness
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Pope Francis has died.
I don't usually talk about my personal beliefs, but I want to take a bit of time here to do some reflections because I think American Christianity is in a crisis point, and this has consequences for all of us, regardless of your faith or lackthereof, or whether you're American or live in the US (I'm neither). This is not a text by a Christian for Christians, but rather a text by someone who refuses to let go of a fundamental tenet of Christianity, and how that refusal can shed some light on the maga world. This will hopefully make sense by the end of it.
There are two parts to this: in the first part, I will go through why the Parable of the Good Samaritan is so inconvenient to many self-declared Christians today. In the second part, I will go through the concept of Ordo Amoris, recently proclaimed by JD Vance and rebuked by Pope Francis himself. Both parts are linked to how authoritarian Christians in the USA deliberately reinterpret the world to fit a politics that rejects Jesus’ own, explicit, teachings.
In a next piece, partly based on this text, I will try and make a prediction about the maga world, Vance, and Russia. I'll try and find the time for it, and you can show your support below.
Background
I grew up Catholic1 and went to a Catholic school run by nuns until the age of 15 in the mountains of Lebanon. The images of Jesus, Mary, St Francis of Assisi and the various Lebanese saints such as Mar Charbel and Saint Rafka2 are just part of my cultural wallpaper (and the literal wallpaper in the family home.) If there is one mythology (in the Tolkienite sense) that can be said to define my formative years, it is Christianity, and specifically Catholicism.3
Through the years, my personal relationship with Catholicism - and Christianity more broadly - changed, but I have maintained a commitment to a specific aspect of that background, and it's a pretty big one. Even as I grew critical of the Church for its leadership's complicity in crimes and corruption, I could not fully dissociate myself from the radicalism of Jesus Christ himself. In fact, my issues with the leadership often stemmed from a stubborn understanding (thank God for my autism) that if something means something specific, it cannot also mean its opposite.
This is why to this day, I am confident enough in my understanding of the bible to be angry when Jesus’ fan club speaks in his name while promoting the most cowardly and morally bankrupt politics imaginable. By the time I'm done, I will hopefully have explained why any of this matters to all of us, Christian or not.
So here goes.
The Inconvenient Samaritan
There are two Great Commandments proclaimed by Jesus (Matthew 22:35–40, Mark 12:28–34, Luke 10:27a). On these two, Jesus says, “hang all the law and the prophets.”
This was in response to someone asking him "which commandment is the first of all?":
"The first is, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’
The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
But who is my neighbor? This is important to understand what Vance is trying to do with Ordo Amoris.
Jesus answered that one, too, with the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. 32 So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii[e] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
On the 3rd April 1968, the day before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr spoke in support of the striking sanitation workers at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. In it, he called for us to “develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness” and used the Parable of the Good Samaritan to exemplify that dangerous unselfishness:
Jesus talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother.
(It is between 29:15 and 34:45 and is worth listening to in full. You can also read the longer text in the footnotes.)4
That Good Samaritan was shot and killed the next day.
By that point though, MLK Jr had already also concluded that it is not enough to only respond to the crises they create, but that the structures that produce inequalities must also be tackled:
We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. (“Where Do We Go from Here?” Sermon, 1967)
In other words, if to love God is to love your neighbor, whatever injustice befalls that person is an injustice against God. MLK Jr saw the significance of the parable as not just requiring us to help the one individual struggling, but of also demanding us to fundamentally reshape our reality so that the causes of that suffering are overcome to no longer cause it.
The Parable forces those invested in the ‘King’ bit in ‘Christ the King’ to remember that the king is a Refugee, a Migrant, a vulnerable person who needs the Good Samaritan to pay attention to what's happening. Jesus was himself a refugee, his family fleeing persecution. The entire cosmology of Christianity does not hold without that centering. It is the core of the Great Commandments. It is non-negotiable.
The Parable is meant to be uncomfortable. Jesus’ story is as inconvenient as it gets. It is why no matter how many leaders of Churches - or ‘the Church’ - have tried to keep the faith into confines of a never-ending reproduction of the status quo, no matter how cruel and unjust, no matter how many want a King who, surely, does not require a Good Samaritan, that same faith kept on stubbornly producing people like Martin Luther King Jr.
That is because the Golden Rule is so easy to understand it just cannot be interpreted in any other way. Those who get it are also moved by the fact that so many who should supposedly get it don't seem to. At least, they don't act like they do. The Golden Rule was proclaimed by Jesus himself on the Sermon of the Mount. That is the whole love thy neighor as thyself bit, if you're wondering.
Two thousand years of Christianities with its thousands of offshoots and still, the only aspect I care about one's Christianity is whether the faithful takes that centering as seriously as Jesus himself did. If they do not, I cannot take their profession of faith seriously. I don't care what they call themselves. If they reject that central component, they are lying - and if there's one thing that gets to me it's moral cowards who preach a holier than thou message while trampling all over a core component of their own professed faith.
As James Baldwin put it5 (a quote I've brought up a thousand times):
I take my queue from Jesus Christ who told me, told all of us, to love each other, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and visit those in prison. If you can't do that, you're not a believer. I don't care what church you go to.
There are those within the Catholic Church who do understand that basic truth that non-Catholics like Baldwin and MLK Jr understood. These should expect to be persecuted by the Trump admin if they refuse to compromise on their principles. Bishop Mark J. Seitz, who is also the president of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference’s Committee on Migration, made it clear: “I fully expect the church to be persecuted” over the church’s commitment to helping vulnerable migrants and refugees. This will be important for the prediction.
But first.
Ordo Amoris
This brings us to JD Vance. I know, I'm sorry. We have to do this.
Trump's VP calls himself a Catholic. He converted to Catholicism in fact, in 2019. Vance, who was briefly with the Pope a day before the Pope died,6 must not believe his luck. Pope Francis had issued a rare open letter in direct response to a claim that Vance made about Ordo Amoris (‘order of love’).
Let's first get the story of what happened out of the way. Here's the gist of it:
Vance claimed that Ordo Amoris justified a hierarchy of care:
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 [on] and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.
So in that hierarchy, there is: 1- the family, 2- your neighbor, 3- your community, 4- your fellow citizens in your own country and 5- everyone else in the world.
In response, Pope Francis issued that aforementioned rare open letter.
In it, he said the following:
Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. 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. But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.
Now I don't know how much you know about Catholicism, but if the Pope himself issues a personal rebuttal to something you said, it's a big deal. Vance, presumably, as a Catholic, believes that the Pope is the guy who inherited Saint Peter's role, given to him directly by the big JC himself. You don't have to believe in any of that, but he has to.7 In response, while admitting that he is ‘still learning’ and that he is still ‘a baby Catholic', Vance said he will defend his views.
Now, most Christians, including Catholics, will not have heard of Ordo Amoris before Vance brought it up. That's partly why it irritates me so much. He tried to sound intellectual by bringing up a little-known concept, and he, deliberately or out of ignorance - and at some point the difference is irrelevant - made a specific claim about it.
Remember the Greatest Commandments above. There are two of them: The whole I am the lord thy God and there's only one God which you must love etc - that's number 1 - and love thy neighbor as thyself - that's number 2. You might reasonably conclude that there's a hierarchy there. Jesus makes it extremely clear though: those are the same thing. It is an empty statement to say, as a Christian, that you love God without also loving your neighbor. If you take Vance's understanding of Ordo Amoris seriously, then the Good Samaritan was a fool for helping that guy. That guy was neither the Good Samaritan's family member, nor his neighbor, nor his community, nor his ‘fellow citizen' (Christians are supposed to all be part of the Kingdom of God - there is no hierarchy of citizens/non-citizens). No, he was the number five on the list Vance vomited: everyone else, the rest of the world. Jesus explicitely made that fifth one one of the Great Commandments. Jesus made it clear that the Good Samaritan did not just help some guy, but by doing so he helped Jesus himself, you know, the Messiah.
Are you with me? Do you get it? Mr I am a Catholic JD Vance's own stated hierarchy of care rejects Jesus’ own Great Commandment. Like that preacher from the Christian Evangelical Charismatic movement who asked his followers for another private jet8 because “I firmly believe that if Jesus were here today, he wouldn't be riding a donkey,” Christians like Vance loathe the fact that the Jesus they want is not the Jesus they got, the one in the Bible.
Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde tried to remind the profoundly broken humans sitting in front of her of that. What she was trying to do in that moment is make them uncomfortable. It clearly hasn't worked, but I think it still tells us something important.
Christians like Vance need to make things up about Jesus. They cannot accept the simplest of teachings coming out of Jesus’ own mouth as recalled in the book they believe is holy. They have to believe that Jesus wouldn't ride a donkey today because they cannot accept that Jesus said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24) because that would make their own pursuit of endless wealth at the expense of everyone else, by definition, a betrayal of the faith. For that same reason, they have to act as though Jesus never told the Parable of the Good Samaritan. If they accept any of this, they would have to view themselves as the modern equivalent of the Romans who crucified their Christ -because that's what they are.
That's what makes the Parable so inconvenient, and it's why Pope Francis brought it up to explain Ordo Amoris after JD Vance claimed it meant the opposite of what it means. Allow me to emphasize the last sentence Pope Francis wrote: “worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations [fraternity, Good Samaritan etc], easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.”
The will of the strongest as the criterion of truth. That's ‘might is right’, the credo of totalitarianism. The Catholic Pope was telling Catholic Vance that what he was doing was contrary to what Jesus demands of him, that it effectively aligned him with the totalitarians that crucified Christ. Again, that makes Vance and his ilk the modern Romans, and it makes their victims - migrants, refugees, trans people and everyone else they're going after - Jesus. They're going after Jesus. That's a pretty bad thing for Christians to do, right?
That's what Ordo Amoris means here. Their precious Jesus is dying of thirst crossing the Darién Gap, buried alive under the rubble of Gaza and being deported to a torture camp in El Salvador, and yet rightwing Christians like Vance are not just ignoring the Parable, they're going after all the Good Samaritans. They're breaking up families, destroying communities, stripping the rights of ‘fellow citizens’ and bullying and terrorizing everyone else. They're making it a crime to be a Good Samaritan, but what they don't understand is that it is often a crime to be a Good Samaritan. There will still be Good Samaritans.
Conclusion
I think Seitz was right in expecting the Catholic Church to be persecuted, but I think that same Church can use some of its same professed ideals to ask itself difficult questions. Whether they do so or not, I don't know. What I do know is that while Pope Francis was clearly better than his predecessors on many issues, he, like so many Catholics, failed to acknowledge the harm caused by the Church's opposition to basic freedoms such as reproductive rights and LGBT (especially trans) rights. Pope Francis’ own declaration of what Ordo Amoris is recognises that the path ahead is still open, that opening that “Christian love” up is what allows Catholics to “gradually mature in” their “identity and vocation.” It is up to them to recognise the harm they have already done, including to Catholic trans people, and work to heal the wound they took part in causing.
If they don't do so, then they will continue being part of creating this hierarchy of care that Vance professed, and that Francis explicitely rejected. The actions of the Catholic Church in this case have indeed been, so far, much closer to Vance's understanding of Ordo Amoris, which is a grave moral failure on their part. It's their job to fix that. It's their job to be uncomfortable.
Next (maybe): The declared understanding of Ordo Amoris tells us something about what Vance and a good chunk of the maga world want, which brings me to the prediction. Stay tuned.
To be precise: Antiochene Syriac Maronite, Melkite Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic - yes all three at the same time. That's why I'll just say Catholic - to avoid a headache.
Not to mention that image of St George killing a dragon, which I am not a fan of. I'm pro dragons.
And Lord of the Rings, which is a very Catholic story anyway.
Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. One day a man came to Jesus, and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters of life. At points he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew and throw him off base....
Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother.
Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn't stop. At times we say they were busy going to a church meeting, an ecclesiastical gathering, and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn't be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that "One who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony." And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem -- or down to Jericho, rather to organize a "Jericho Road Improvement Association." That's a possibility. Maybe they felt that it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effect.
But I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible that those men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles -- or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked -- the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"
That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" The question is, "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.
In his last interview as well, as it happens. Watch it in full (it's not an hour long - there's a problem with the video so it repeats after 20 or so minutes):
I'm not saying he caused this but
This doesn't mean that no dissent is possible within the Catholic faith. Of course it is. That's why you have conservative Catholics and progressive and radical Catholics. The faith, somehow, includes everyone from ‘tradcaths’ - who claim to reject the Second Vatican Council (let me know when they make the effort to actually learn Latin) and calling themselves anti-feminists while spending their time cosplaying ‘traditional’ gender roles without giving up the victories afford to them by the feminist movement -to liberation theologians, from those who spend their days advocating for further restricting fundamental human rights to those taking risks pushing for social change.
I don't like the former, you will be shocked to know, so here are examples of those I like:
Jessica Reznicek, for example, a member of the Catholic Worker Movement was sentenced to eight years in 2021 for trying to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (send her messages of support here).
More examples:
2016: Father Martin Newell and four other protestors from Christian Climate Action were arrested outside the UK’s Department for Energy and Climate Change for “vandalism,” which is the term used by the UK state for writing words on a wall and not the term they'd use for oil companies ravaging the planet.
2024: How are the latest prison sentences affecting clerical activists?
2025: A Jesuit priest prefers prison over a fine to draw attention to climate change
2020: Birmingham priest arrested in Extinction Rebellion protest
Here's Jesse Duplantis asking his followers for an upgrade to his existing private jet.
Thank you for this piece, really resonated with me as someone who grew up very Protestant, and has tried to maintain the radical belief in human dignity even while not believing or practising much anymore.
p.S. also, I am amazed you wrote this within a day of the Pope passing, well done!
Footnote #6…🧿