I hesitate to admit this, but I put “another carefully timed pandemic” on my 2025 bingo card, and yet somehow missed putting “the vice president of the United States wields ‘ordo amoris’ in a debate on the priorities of love” on it.
Silly me; how could I have missed that one?
The internet has certainly not missed weighing in on the subject in the aftermath. Googling “J.D. Vance ordo amoris,” currently brings search results that say everything from “J.D. Vance states the obvious about ordo amoris” to “JD Vance is wrong; Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love” to “Vice President Vance and a call for good public theology.”
Ordo amoris, by the way, is a Latin phrase meaning “rightly ordered loves” and comes from “The City of God,” written by St. Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century. To put it in perhaps oversimplistic terms, while we are to love everyone, we are not (and really cannot) love everyone in the exact same degree and manner. And if you have ever used some version of the phrase, “Charity begins at home,” you have expressed ordo amoris perhaps without even realizing you were doing so.
This debate seems to have ignited in the powder room of the illegal immigration debate and has gone on to draw combatants from across the globe. In sitting back and watching it all for a few days, I have seen both reasoned responses on both sides and utter lunacy on both sides. Put another way, there are people who truly want to do right and help others on each side of this, and then there are a few in either camp who seem to have some fairly evil goals in mind for pushing their side of the issue.