There is sooo much coming out of DC that it is impossible to keep up with and still maintain normal daily activities. But this one may have slipped past a lot of us. Musk and Trump are creating most of the chaos, acting illegally and betting that our court system can’t keep up. But third-wheel JD Vance has been making some news as well.

As many know, Vance converted to Catholicism as an adult in 2019. He was interviewed on Fox recently and invoked the concept of ordo amoris, Augustine’s ordering of loves. Terence Sweeney, a professor at Villanova University, does a much better job than I ever could explaining what Vance got wrong about ordo amoris. Below are excerpts from his column but I encourage you to read it in full in America Magazine.

Sweeney writes, “It is in this context that Vice President JD Vance introduced the idea of the ordo amoris, or ordering of loves, into this discourse. During a Fox News interview, he stated, ‘There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.'” Vance goes on to say that the left has inverted this, “…they seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside of their own borders…”

Sweeney concludes “What Mr. Vance gets wrong is that the point of Christian teaching is to expand, even transform, our order of loves.” Sweeney ends with “The ordo amoris was never about loving less or more narrowly—but about loving more and more widely.”

In Catholic circles, there has been widespread debate. I fall on the side of loving more and more widely. Vance’s comments taken with the actions of this administration to cut funding and programs for poor people near and far calls into question his commitment to ordo amoris, in any order.