Fr. Peter Totleben: Vice President Vance, the Good Samaritan, and the “Order of Love”

By Fr. Peter Totleben, O.P., Catholic World Report, Feb. 10, 2025

Fr. Peter Totleben, O.P. is a Dominican friar of the Province of St. Joseph. He is currently a doctoral student and a chaplain to Dominican nuns

It is the modern affinity for egalitarianism that raises suspicions about the ordo amoris.

It’s not often that Catholic theology breaks into the news cycle, but this is just what happened when Vice President J. D. Vance gave an interview to FOX News defending the Trump administration’s actions regarding immigration and its “America First” stance on foreign policy. Vance appealed to the traditional theological concept of the “order of love” (ordo amoris)—the idea that our love of neighbor has a certain set of priorities—to justify prioritizing the needs of citizens over immigrants and domestic concerns over foreign ones.

As Vance put it:

But 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. …

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