Part Prayer, Part Prompt
Newsletter for February 14, 2025
I remember hearing an interview with the late Orthodox theologian Kallistos Ware where he noted—partially as an observation, partially as a warning—how new converts to Orthodoxy often rush to adopt poses of authority over the church’s history and tradition. He saw this especially in converts from the Evangelical world, particularly those who hastened to identify themselves with the role of starets or spiritual elder. The implication was that they wanted the outward form without the requisite interior work—the long, often painful process of “self-naughting” whereby we turn over attachments to our image so that Christ may more freely express himself through us.
Ware’s words came to mind this past week, after we watched Vice President J. D. Vance hastily deploy the theology of ordo amoris (the “order of love”) to justify the current administration’s draconian immigration policies. On Monday, no less than Pope Francis himself pushed back against this unimaginative bracketing of love as part of his open letter to the US bishops:
The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.
Vance is a relatively recent convert to the church who, from what I have read of his story, seems to have been drawn to Catholicism as a kind of static moral code to stabilize and in some sense ameliorate the chaos of modern American life. As he wrote in an essay detailing his spiritual journey: “[W]ho could look at the statistics on what our early twenty-first century culture and politics had wrought—the misery, the rising suicide rates, the ‘deaths of despair’ in the richest country on earth, and doubt that the sins of parents had any effect on their children?”
It is not for us to judge what brings another to the church, and there is nothing wrong with an attraction to its tradition as a grounding force. But a conversion story that, in the words of Michael Sean Winters, “reduces Catholicism not just to ethics, but to an ideology” overlooks what Christ identified to his friend Martha as “the better part” (Luke 10:42)—namely, himself, as a living and dynamic presence who leads us out of our contrived securities into something deeper. This is the Christ who “reorders” our notions of neighborliness in Francis’s citation of the Good Samaritan, and it is the Christ of another passage from Luke, the Sermon on the Plain, that will challenge us in the readings this coming Sunday to revise our hierarchy of values in accordance with the kingdom.
Francis’s open letter includes a trenchant line: “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.” The words are weighted with such prophetic bearing it feels like we’re hearing them a hundred years hence. Whether the vice president reads them, reflects on them, and allows them to modulate his position of power is between him and the Holy Spirit. As part prayer, part prompt, I would offer him his own insight from the aforementioned essay: “In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.”
Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic