Following up on my previous posts:
- Pope Francis vs. JD Vance On Immigration (Feb. 23, 2025)
- How JD Vance, A ‘Baby Catholic,’ Stumbled Into A Clash With Pope Francis (Apr. 27, 2025)
Washington Post: Pope Leo Teaches a Lesson From Jesus That JD Vance Should Listen To, by John Connelly (UC-Berkeley):
Soon after taking office, Vice President JD Vance stumbled into a dispute with the Vatican about the heart of church teaching: the duty to love one’s neighbor. In a TV interview, Vance elaborated 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 in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” Pope Francis responded that Christians do not dole out love “little by little” in ever weaker concentric circles, and an account under Leo’s name, when he was a cardinal, tweeted the headline of a column in the National Catholic Reporter: “JD Vance is wrong, Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
Christians have always debated how to interpret the message of Jesus. There are four gospels and not one; their emphases differ; sometimes they seem to contradict one another. And there are centuries of tradition: Vance has a solid case in terms of very old teaching. Into the 1960s moral theology replicated Vance’s points quite precisely. …
This sort of thinking is no longer taught in seminaries. …
At the closing of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI noted, “The old story of the Samaritan has been the model of the spirituality of the council.” Statements since the council emphasize, as Francis and Leo have, the unboundedness of love taught by Christ; in his final letter to the U.S. bishops, Francis urged us to “meditate constantly on the parable of the Good Samaritan.” …
Jesus made the other show us how to be our proper selves. We are to put ourselves into the position of the hunted, despised foreigner. Leo has not been content to simply preach the Gospel. He lived and shared the lives of Peruvians, and after a while found that being a neighbor meant becoming one of them. Leo is also a Catholic bearing the lessons of the 20th century: had more of us shared the sensitivity he expresses so clearly as the church’s highest authority, then fewer of us would have stood by as the Nazis and their helpers rounded up Jews during the Holocaust, believing this was happening to “them” but not to us.
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