Catholic JD Vance is the only elected American politician that I know of who is criticized by Pope Francis

 Pope Francis vs. Veep Vance: Echo essay published in THE.INK on substack.

It is not a good day for the Catholic convert JD Vance when he hears a direct criticism from the Pope. Frankly, as a Roman Catholic woman, I have no respect for JD Vance, because he is just a parrot who speaks anything put in his brain by his Trumpzi cult leader. Christian nationalism is not Catholicism!

Who is right in this dispute over immigrants? And we dig deeper into the connection between Christian nationalism and American fascism.

The Ink and Anya Kamenetz

Maine Writer opinion- What hubris possess Vance whereby he feels qualified to give lecturs about who among us, in the human condition, should be "prioritized" for receiving love and mercy?

Vice President JD Vance, fresh off arguing for the end of the Constitution’s separation of powers,😕😒😟- even as he took the oath of office to protect the Constitution on January 20th❗ -has already found himself in yet another doctrinal dispute, squaring off this time with Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church.

Last week, Vance (squawked❗) talked to (fake❗) Fox News about how his views on immigration — opposed to the teachings of Christianity as they might seem — were indeed rooted in his Catholic faith and the religion’s concept of ordo amoris, or “ordered love”:

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 [on] and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.

Vance’s vision of a hierarchy of Christian love — which one supposes justifies things like lying about Springfield’s Haitian community and building a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay — inspired the letter Pope Francis sent on Monday to American bishops, reminding them of the Church’s clearly stated obligation to treat refugees with the same dignity they would treat anyone else — and arguing pointedly against Vance’s creative theological interpretation:

Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups…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.

But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.

It’s not every day that the pope singles out a Catholic convert for a public scolding. Hillbilly Elegy, or Hell-Bully Energy❓

Pope Francis' statement reflects a theological, moral, and political position very much opposed to the one held by Vance, and to the one that animates many American believers today (according to Pew Research, around half of American Catholics, and 67 percent of White evangelical Protestants support Trump).

(NOT this Roman Catholic.....I abhor Evilism Trumpziism.) 

But it’s not all believers — there’s a tension here, if not an outright schism quite yet. Many members of American denominations and religious groups, however, feel the way Pope Francis does (and 27 of them have filed suit to block the administration's plans to carry out immigration raids in houses of worship).

Pope Francis also writes in the letter: “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.” That’s pretty clearly a warning for Vance, and for the United States — and whether we’re at the beginning or end of that story isn’t quite clear yet.

SPEAK UP: What do you think? Are our moral obligations a series of concentric circles, starting with our own people and moving outward and diluting with each successive circle? Or are we compelled to love equally across differences and borders?