'Love thy neighbour' and immigration
Bishop Robert Barron on whether we are called to love everyone equally
“Now the order of nature is such that every natural agent pours forth its activity first and most of all on the things which are nearest to it … Therefore we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected with us.”
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II-II, q.31, a.3
I just wanted to flag up this short video from Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire.
The Ordo Amoris is getting a lot of airplay since raised by Vice-President Vance: here from The Narnian; Andrew Berg (Dreamer and Realist); Rob Martin Report; Window Light; Wyatt Graham; The Pilgrim’s Progress; Taylor Marshall; Father Andre Marie; Matt Fradd’s Pints with Aquinas; and the American Postliberal.
There are Christian voices such as
, and many others who are deeply sceptical about any interface between politics and the machinations of state on the one hand, and Christian ethics and practice on the other. From this point of view, Jesus’ message was pretty clear, uncompromising and troubling. The imperative to ‘love your neighbour’ captured in the parable of the good Samaritan, trumps any narrower self-interest or worldly concern and, ideally, should never be compromised. Proponents of this ‘wild’ uncompromising view of Christ often invoke the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac or Jesus’s instruction to ‘let the dead bury the dead (Luke 9: 60) to illustrate the otherworldly tenor of Christian mission.There are many who have disagreed (e.g. Father Jeffrey Kirby). But ‘love thy neighbour essentialism’ is certainly a compellingly simple reading. It’s straightforward — and almost no-one can live by it completely. For as Barron points out, drawing, unsurprisingly, on Aquinas, the nested nature of our solidarities is intuitive and built into the basic anthropology of what it is to be human. For instance, the story of King Solomon and the mothers contending over a baby depends for its power on the assumption that mothers will aways and should always place the interests of their own child above pretty much anything else. And Jesus himself is pretty harsh about anyone who leads children astray. Better for them to have a “great millstone fastened around [their] neck[s] and drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6). If the Good Samaritan is to be read as a manifesto for national immigration policy, might it not also be reasonable to assume that the ‘millstone principle’ applies not only to all pedophiles and abusers, but also to those involved in the Muslim rape gangs in the UK, to those in the communities who have covered and still cover for them, to those in the media who run cover for the community, and those in politics who enact policies which lead directly to orders of magnitude increases in the scale of such crimes. After all, the statistics are pretty clear. This from
yesterday. 25% of sexual offences committed by migrants.
I’m not presenting this as a slam dunk case that Christians should be on the kind of national-populist, conservative right represented at the recent ARC conference. We are always going to fall on many different parts of the spectrum because the Bible and history is open to multiple interpretations. At the same time, many issues, such as immigration, are prudential in nature, meaning that devout Catholics can easily and legitimately land on very different sides of a political or policy debate. There is no avoiding that and perhaps it is a good thing because it means that Christianity always has the potential for course correction.
[M]any issues, such as immigration, are prudential in nature, meaning that devout Catholics can easily and legitimately land on very different sides of a political or policy debate. There is no avoiding that and perhaps it is a good thing because it means that Christianity always has the potential for course correction.
One feature of Christendom is that although many bad things were done, and sinful, prideful popes and kings erred sometimes with genocidal intent, overall the Church has revealed the unfolding story and potential of God’s love. This I think is the takeaway of the now ubiquitous but no less compelling Tom Holland story of ‘cultural Christianity’.
Bishop Barron’s theology of Ordo Amoris broken down
As a theological addendum to the Tom Holland thesis, it is worth listening in detail to Bishop Barron’s summary position in this video. He elaborates a number of ideas that are counter-intuitive and even disturbing on first take. These include:
Love is to will the good of the other (Aquinas)
We are called to love God with all our heart. There is no good that we can give God, but to love him is to order our will to the supreme good that he is.
If we love God, then we must love everything that God loves (i.e. all creatures - which means also bugs, trees, stones); which means in consequence love of neighbour (and the non-natural world BTW). So Jesus’ injunction is really and deeply a consequence or the first and second commandments.
If love means to ‘will the good of another’ that doesn’t mean we love all creatures with the same intensity. Mosquitoes are creatures. We should love them in the sense of recognizing their place on the earth and their right to exist. It doesn’t mean we have to love being bitten, or desist from swatting them, or not try to find solutions to malaria.
Cardinal George: God loves all his creatures — but he doesn’t love them all equally in the sense that he wills different kinds and magnitudes of good for each. A mosquito exists and God loves it. But he has willed any human being higher order of good than any insect; and in the same way, he wills a Seraphim a higher order of good than a human being. Mary was born without sin. That is a different order of love than for any other woman before or since. This is not denigrating to us or to God, or to the mosquito. It is just an observation that it is possible for God to will different orders of good to his different creatures.
In this sense, ‘posing self as other’ it is necessary that we love oneself — to will the good of the self as other. Being healthy, eating well, avoiding danger are all perfectly reasonable forms of self-love. And loving one’s neighbour is about willing those same goods to another.
‘Loving your enemy’ is not loving the other in anticipation of some return on investment. It is love without reciprocation. It is the ultimate test because the enemy won’t love you back. Loan to those who can’t pay you back. Give a party for those who won’t give one back.
Willing the good, doesn’t necessarily mean giving people what they want. What is good may not be immediately obvious. Sometimes love requires saying no, resisting certain actions.
In some of the most disarming episodes in the Bible, the question at issue is not love between creatures but love of creatures for God. God’s insistence that Abraham should be willing to sacrifice Isaac relates to love of God. Love of God is a qualitatively different to other kinds of love. God is not one being among many; not the highest creature to love — but rather the ground of all being. Love of God is distinct and unique. “The bible constantly brings us to that point….when push comes to shove who do you love more?”Abraham has to love God even more than the thing he loves more than anything else in the world. This is also the point Jesus is making when he says ‘let the dead bury the dead’; or in Luke 14:26, when he says "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple." He’s clearly not commanding the disavowal of family (see Matthew 15:4-6 — ‘honour your parents’). This is not a point about balancing the good we will to different people (including the ‘self as other’) — interests which may be in tension or involve trade offs. It is the priority of our love for God which is necessarily of a different order.
The Good Samaritan and Ordo Amoris
The Good Samaritan parable begs the question of ‘who is my neighbour’ and clearly in one sense every person is my neighbour. But this is not necessarily a good guide for action and behaviour. Barron argues that your neighbour, as it emerges from the parable, ‘in that morally relevant sense [is] …someone in need who you can help.’ This points to people in one’s ‘scope of influence’ who you can actually help. It is fundamentally an interpersonal vision.
Barron’s common sense understanding focuses on inter-personal relationships. It undercuts the abstract humanism that levels and flattens, making equivalent all the help that one could conceivable offer to every individual in existence, who you might not even know — in a specific personal sense — exists
Barron doesn’t make this point, but broadening the focus, the same hierarchy applies to our regard for all creatures qua God’s Creation. We are called to love all creatures as God does (apart from anything else simply by willing them— loving them— into existence). But this clearly doesn’t mean that respect translates into identical behaviour. In order to live: we dig the ground and quarry stone; we eat vegetables; most of us kill animals and eat meat. We are simultaneously called to respect the beauty and integrity of the geology and landscape; the ecological integrity and biodiversity of ecosystems; and the dignity of animals which have a capacity for pain and suffering.
Whom do you love first and with what kind of intensity? Barron argues that we can try to operate a kind of bland universalism and make no distinctions. But we will fail because a hierarchy of love and solidarity is built into our God-given anthropology and Natural Law. This is the essence of the Ordo Amoris — the order of love.
Ordo amoris comes from Augustine and Aquinas. God wills good to varying degrees and levels of intensity. In the same way, it is physically and psychologically impossible for any human being to love every other person in the world to the same degree and with the same intensity.
Barron doesn’t spell this out, but the often disingenuous attempt to do this — to will the good of every human being with a completely levelling equity — has been a persistent feature of every revolutionary utopian movement in the modern era. In every case — from the French Revolution, to Soviet Russia, the killing fields of Cambodia and most recently the woke impetus of DEI — this attempt to abolish the natural, personalist hierarchy of care and reciprocation, has involved the surrender of agency to impersonal state bureaucracies which have become corrupt and gone on to commit atrocities in the name of universal love. This was intrinsic to what Horkheimer and Adorno identified as the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’. Sadly, their own cultural Marxism simply led to another iteration in the guise of woke.
[T]he often disingenuous attempt to … will the good of every human being with a completely levelling equity — has been a persistent feature of every revolutionary utopian movement in the modern era. In every case — from the French Revolution, to Soviet Russia, the killing fields of Cambodia and most recently the woke impetus of DEI — this attempt to abolish the natural, personalist hierarchy of care and reciprocation, has involved the surrender of agency to impersonal state bureaucracies which have become corrupt and gone on to commit atrocities in the name of universal love.
The personalist vision of Aquinas and Augustine — of orthodox Christianity, East and West, Greek and Latin — has centred on proximity, both spatial and social. As with Solomon and the contending mothers, our first obligations are to those to whom we are closest in spatial and social terms. Initially this is about family and kin; and then neighbours; and then fellow citizens.
The Christian revolution didn’t overturn the Ordo Amoris. Christ never sought to reject Natural-Law affiliations. In Matthew 15:4-6 he reiterates God’s command to honour parents. In Matthew 19 he insists on the sanctity of marriage, saying that God accepted divorce only temporarily and in recognition of Israel’s fallen state. Being ‘of one flesh’ clearly involves an intensity of love and a ‘willing of the good for the other’ that is an order of magnitude greater than good neighbourliness.
Even as he suffered moments from a terrible death — through which our Lord redeemed salvation for all — Jesus showed a special care for Mary, His mother:
“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son!’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home’” (Jn. 19:26-27).
Reiterating this point, Barron points to the inevitable necessity of trade offs. As a priest he wouldn’t be justified in abandoning all parish duties — confirmations, marriages, baptisms, funerals — because of an obligation to do something about problems occurring in Germany or people dying in Sudan. The abstract universal ethic of Kant can make no such distinctions. But human beings do so all the time qua humanity. Clearly Germans and Sudanese people are subjects of infinite dignity, just like his parishioners in Rochester. But ‘I’d be irresponsible’ he says, to defer the interests of his flock in Rochester in favour of those much further away — people who he’s not in a position to help personally and directly anyway. “That’s the common sensical position behind the Ordo Amoris”
Having equal moral regard for all people is not the same as equal treatment. Everyone is a beloved child of God who I am called to love. But then there are legitimate and inevitable prudential questions about what I am able to do, who I am closest to, where my first responsibilities lie etc.
Prudential common sense aside, how then is the parable of the Good Samaritan to be reconciled with the Ordo Amoris? Barron’s proposition is really quite straightforward. When presented with some particular person, who I don’t now, in immediate clear need, who I am able to help, am I then obligated to suspend the Ordo Amoris in order to help him or her? The answer is an unequivocal ‘yes of course’. This is straight out of Aquinas. Yes family, community and country first — but this order of obligation should and must be suspended where possible.
The problem comes “when we universalize the Good Samaritan and attempt to have equal concern for everyone all the time and in the same way”. The exception can’t become the rule applying to everyone all over the world in the same way. This would be, according to Barron, psychologically and spiritually impossible. But at the same time, we can’t lock ourselves into the Ordo Amoris and let it become an excuse for us to become callous, selfish or cowardly.
But at the same time, we can’t lock ourselves into the Ordo Amoris and let it become an excuse for us to become callous, selfish or cowardly.
When people present themselves, we should help. But does that mean that we should ever sacrifice people closer to us for strangers? That’s a matter of prudential judgement. Generally speaking Barron’s answer is that we shouldn’t. But it would be a case by case determination. However, your first obligation must be to your family and nested communities.
Is the Good Samaritan a counter point to the ORdo Amoris? Not for Barron. It is he argues a ‘both/and’ rather than an either/or. Sometimes the Ordo Amoris is to be suspended in the face of individual need. Does this apply to nation-states in relation to immigration and asylum? Yes of course. But there is still room to be very discriminating about the genuineness, scale or intensity of the needs presented and how they are to be balanced with other needs closer to home. Again Barron doesn’t spell it out — he’s a good politician in that respect. However, there is definitely a prudential case to be made that the scale of mass migration in the West now threatens not only the economic and political interests of disadvantaged people (including established migrants from previous generations) within these nation-states; but also could lead to conflict and civil war which would also be extremely harmful to those would-be migrants. From a prudential point of view a moratorium on migration could and perhaps should be linked to greater help within those countries from which the exodus is coming.
Cultural Christianity: Last word on the politics
At the risk of simplifying, the radical universalist thrust of socialist and progressivist politics would dismiss the Ordo Amoris and hold up an abstract universalist conception of ‘the good’ which must be willed with equal intensity to all human beings qua humanity. This is, as Barron points out, a psychological and spiritual, but also practical, impossibility for ordinary individuals because we are finite creatures. Instead, the utopians make the state into an idol and create brutal projects which attempt to build Heaven on Earth. The impetus actually to build a New Jerusalem is what Voegelin described as the ‘immanentization of the eschaton’. It always ends in tragedy — the guillotine, the gulag, the concentration camp, or perhaps merely the mass mutilation of health children and a state of pervasive unhappiness and demographic collapse. Choose your poison.
There are those such as
and () who recognize this danger and reject utopian leftist politics for what it is. But they are equally suspicious of the project of cultural christianity on the right — the kind of project associated with Douglas Murray, JD Vance and the broad thrust of the post liberals ( ) . In a way, I think there is a category error at play. Conservatism which is mostly Christian in origin, starts from the assumption of sin and crooked timbers. It assumes that corruption and violence are likely endemic to any societal project. The practical problem is to create arrangements in which virtues are most likely to flourish and which reduce the potential for bad (sinful) behaviour. Such arrangements have always depended on a tissue of familial, community, national and humanitarian patterns of mutual identification and solidarity that is constructed and develops resilience only over generations. This work is always about trade offs and prudential judgements of exactly the kind that Bishop Barron describes. In practical terms, the only other path for Christians is to withdraw from the world. That is a judgement only individuals can make. Perhaps even some with families may choose martyrdom and the sacrifice of worldly goods, security, employment and perhaps even their lives in the face of intra and inter-societal conflicts. There have been many martyrs in history who have chosen precisely this. My gut tells me that prudential reasoning (for Christians) and evolved sentiments (Hume - for those not blessed with faith) would and will lead most people to look after their families and communities first. And it is for this reason that Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Churches have, over nearly 2000 years — along with the Tao, CS Lewis and Tolkien (according to Anthony Esolen) — sided with some version of what Augustine called Ordo Amoris. Edward Feser’s pithy tweet was a little rude, but he made his point. For CS Lewis, the erosion of virtuous patterns of socialization rooted in the ordered hierarchy of love and affiliation (‘the way’) generates ‘men without chests’ — and will eventually lead to the destruction of humanity. Our humanity he insists, starts with the ordered love within the family.
The progressive denial is an expression mostly of ‘woolly liberal bromides and foot stomping’ — not always, but certainly where not attached to a sincere embrace of a self-denial for self and family that may, in the not too distant future, require martyrdom.
