Last week many Catholics in the US and online were electrified by the US Vice President’s reference to the “ordo amoris” or rightly ordered love in a Fox News interview.
As I watched a replay of the interview, I could think only of the famous meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV in the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with the somewhat desperate delight of self-recognition.
While JD Vance had raised this hierarchy of relationships previously in his best-selling 2010 book Hillbilly Elegy, here was a thread of theology, from St Thomas Aquinas no less, that Catholics could recognise, plonked in the middle of a televised political discussion of immigration policy.
Some Catholics immediately lauded Vance as the “catechist in chief,” a voice of common sense and traditional values, while others derided his interpretation of John 15 or pointed to the parable of the Good Samaritan to oppose Vance’s assertion regarding the priority of family and one’s own countrymen.
Others sought to hold a more nuanced position, noting that while the essential point of a hierarchy of relationships and order of obligations is manifestly true, the application of this order of charity must consider the urgency of need among our loved ones as well as our neighbours.
I think most of us on the lifelong path of conversion understand that the actual practice of our faith can be more complex or challenging than its theology, especially when competing goods are at play.
The JD Vance interview and the intense commentary that followed also underscored the fact that the relationship between faith and politics is not without complexity. These two intertwined devotions have a long and storied history, too intricate to rehearse here in full.
Yet, the fact that Catholics are and should continue to be involved in the political order is clear. An active participation in public life by the baptised and the influence of Catholic faith in social debate and disputes on political governance, the common good, justice, conditions for peace, immigration, and the protection of the most vulnerable are essential to the church’s evangelical mission in the world.
This necessity of political engagement by members of the church was at the heart of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), though as recognised by that same encyclical—and substantiated by the controversies of the bloody 20th century that followed—this engagement is not without its risks or endangerments.
As evidenced by the Vance interview, Catholic faith is not marginal to political life, but it is also important that the Catholic religion not become a tool for political control. There is always a risk that political engagement by Catholics, rather than upholding the teachings of our faith, the common good and the moral order, gives way to partisan interests or seeks to instrumentalise the faith for its own purposes of power or worldly gain. There can be a risk that the morality of God’s commandments or the profound logic of the Beatitudes are temporarily suspended or rationalised away in the name of efficacy or political expediency.
This risk is especially acute amidst a culture of distrust: “fake news” and popular outrage where political pragmatism and the power of “big tech” risk truth becoming unrecognisable today. The upshot is that the common good, the very pattern of society, and the moral order can become subject to economic or ideological interests.
On his part, Pope Benedict XVI would remind the church in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate (2009) that such a disregard for truth in politics inevitably leads to dehumanisation; for only truth can make us free (John 8:32).
In his later, eloquent account in 2011 of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, Benedict XVI points out that that it was Jesus’ regard for truth that characterised his kingship in contradistinction to the powers of the world.
What came before Pilate at trial was not a figure whose authority was based on the power of the crowd, as had been mobilised by Barrabas to save his own skin, nor was Jesus’ authority a claim to worldly influence and domination. Rather, this powerless Nazarene came before the Sanhedrin, and then to Pilate as the representative of Roman power, to “bear witness to the truth” (John 18:37).
Pope Benedict explains: “‘Bearing witness to the truth’ means giving priority to God and to his will over against the interest of the world and its powers… ‘Redemption’ in the fullest sense can only consist in the truth becoming recognisable. And it becomes recognisable when God becomes recognisable. He becomes recognisable in Jesus Christ.
In Christ, God entered the world and set up the criterion of truth in the midst of history. Truth is outwardly powerless in the world, just as Christ is powerless by the world’s standards: he has no legions; he is crucified. Yet in his very powerlessness, he is powerful: only thus, again and again, does truth become power.”
As we recall in the Apostles’ Creed and the Passion narratives in Eucharist and at Easter, Pontius Pilate did not allow the truth of Jesus into his politics. The Roman Prefect knew too well the truth of Jesus’ case—this man was neither a political criminal nor a real danger to the power of empire. However, devoid of truth, Pilate’s politics saw Christ scourged and crucified.
As Catholics immersed in a political order, our task is to exercise our freedom in providing moral and ethical guidance and indeed in these times courageous leadership, grounded in our theological understanding of human dignity and natural law; to provide a clear and compelling witness to this faith; to defend the most vulnerable; and provide a concrete and real inspiration to the political process to pursue the highest goods while at the same time respecting the autonomy of the state.
While it is true that the forces of secularisation, mass media and certain political lobby groups would be only too keen to see the continued marginalisation or even wholesale eradication of the Catholic faith from the public square, our church does not seek to counter this by the imposition of our faith upon the political order. We are not Catholic integralists, for the Kingdom that Jesus inaugurates and the authority he wields are not those of worldly power or privilege.
In the political order Catholics are called to shape moral consciences, above all our own, and to participate in the drama of political discourse and decision-making in the light of faith. In this way, it becomes possible for our Christian faith and reason to work together to promote human flourishing and the common good. Attentive to God’s divine revelation and its implications, we work to apply moral insights from doctrine and the natural law that is “written on the heart of every person” to real-world situations personally and corporately, with intelligence, conviction and charity, all the while imploring the graces of God.