Pope Informs J.D. Vance He’s Wrong About Migrants, Christianity

Is J.D. Vance more Catholic than the Pope? Photo: Stefano Dal Pozzolo//Contrasto/Redux

Not that long ago, Catholic “traditionalists” were known for their intense commitment to papal authority. But that was when conservative popes like John Paul II and especially Benedict XVI reigned over the Vatican; today, “traditionalists” like the convert J.D. Vance probably relish a squabble with the Holy Father. If so, the vice-president sure got one, as Pope Francis has released an encyclical to U.S. bishops that insists on assistance to migrants as an obligation as old as the church itself and seems to take a pretty firm whack at Vance’s theological defense of an “America First” approach to immigration matters.

Vance started this fight with his recently acquired faith, blasting those same U.S. bishops (many of them conservatives on other matters) for resisting ICE raids on Catholic churches and schools that provide services and shelter to undocumented immigrants. He even suggested on Face the Nation last month that the bishops were acting out of concern not for migrants but for “their bottom line,” the government money they have received for helping refugees resettle. Vance went on to explain to Sean Hannity that his relative lack of charity for immigrants was rooted in the early church concept of ordo amoris (rightly ordered love):

There’s this old-school [concept] — and I think 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,” he said.

He continued: “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.”

Vance’s efforts to be more Catholic than the pope have now elicited a definitive rebuke. Francis’s encyclical calls the Trump administration’s program of mass deportation a “major crisis” and an effort to apply brute force to a global migration trend that calls for sensitivity and compassion: “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.” Francis noted that Christ himself “did not live apart from the difficult experience of being expelled from his own land because of an imminent risk to his life, and from the experience of having to take refuge in a society and a culture foreign to his own. The Son of God, in becoming man, also chose to live the drama of immigration.”

Having presented basic church teachings on immigration, Francis briskly turned to Vance’s ordo amoris defense of nativism:

Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups … 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.

Catholic writer Elizabeth Bruenig put it more plainly in a recent meditation on Vance’s version of the faith:

The decision to love and serve the stranger, the refugee, and the foreigner with charity is a hallmark of the Christian faith, such that a government crackdown on this work seems to be a threat to Christian practice itself, or an attempt to reshape it into something else altogether.

Perhaps Vance is preparing an erudite response to Francis’s encyclical that will put the pontiff in his place and cheer MAGA Catholics who regard migrants as cat-eating criminal scum rather than replicas of the baby Jesus in his flight into Egypt. But Vance may not be as smart as he thinks he is. Evaluating a recent speech by the vice-president claiming religious liberty as a legacy of the early church, the National Catholic Reporter’s Michael Sean Winters demolishes Vance’s “lousy attempt at historiography” and concludes he is “an ingenu [i.e., immature] or a demagogue. Or both.”

In the words of the headline of Winters’s piece, Vance is “in over his head” when he tries to pose as a wise doctor of the church equipped to instruct Catholic bishops and presumably even the Pope. America’s two Catholic presidents, John F. Kennedy and Joe Biden, never did that. Perhaps he should ground his politics not in the Bible or the writings of the early church fathers but in sacred MAGA texts like The Art of the Deal.