Some More Thoughts on the Ordo Amoris

It's this blogs contention that the main reason for the collapse of religion in the West is due to a withdrawal of Grace, primarily as a result of a transformation of the understanding of Christianity by modern theologians and the religious leadership. In "Biblical" language, the shepherds have led the people astray and God isn't too pleased.

Charity or Caritas more precisely, is the stuff of God. Get that wrong and you have God wrong,  and you also get Christianity wrong.

This is why the subject of the Ordo Amoris is interesting, because getting it right is only possible if you understand Caritas properly. And as I said in my previous post, the main reason for misunderstanding it is because when the term "love" is used it is usually associated with emotions, whereas Cartias resides in the Will.

Cartias is more about doing the right thing, regardless of your feelings about the subject. This is why scripture makes a big deal about "Loving" your enemies. Doing the right things by your kids is easy, because you get positive emotions associated with them, doing the right thing by enemies is hard because the emotions push in the opposite direction. But the Christian always aims to do the right thing regardless of the feelings a person has. It all starts to get confusing once feelings and emotions are confused with the Will.

This article, written in Church Life Journal is an example of thinking gone bad. The fact that it is written by a professor of theology at Loyola University and a Law school professor is just another example of the rot in our cultural institutions.  It gets off to a bad start by first quoting Vance:

There’s this old school—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

and then setting up a straw man argument:

"We believe that Aquinas would look askance at the way Mr. Vance employed the idea of ordo amoris to justify cutting off concern for needy people at the nation’s doorstep."

Anyone looking at Vance's comment fairly would not say that. Vance left space for care of the needy but recognised that there were other more pressing priorities as well. And Vance did not argue that Caritas is a zero sum game. 

It's a Strawman argument and Law professors should not set them up.

The article then goes on to say:

What Aquinas says about the order of love or charity (the Latin terms are amor and caritas) describes how we show love to people in the way appropriate to that person’s relationship to us, and we love those closest to us more because we have more ways and opportunities to love them. For example, we care for our children not simply by supporting them financially or granting them access to a safe haven, but also by changing diapers, driving carpools, reading with them, cooking for them, taking them to doctors, cuddling with them, and so forth. It would seem perverse to forego such acts of love and simply send them a check. But no one thinks check-sending is unfitting when dealing with needy strangers; their relative distance often makes this form of beneficence the most fitting way to show our love. Distance does not remove the obligation to help, though it might modify the nature and extent of the help that might be rendered.

All fairly solid traditional thinking on the matter. But then it goes pear shaped:

Love of neighbor as contemplated in the ordo amoris does not require us to treat everyone the way we treat our own children, but it does require us to respond to cases of manifest need.

and,

Thomas Aquinas writes that, when confronted with two people in need, “If one of the two is more closely connected to us and the other is more needy, it is not possible to determine by a universal rule who should be helped more, because there are different degrees of both neediness and proximity, but this requires the judgment of a prudent person.” The ordo amoris does not mean that proximity always trumps urgent need. Aquinas rejects the idea that one can address such matters via universal rule (or executive order). Rather, prudent people must be allowed to make judgments in complex situations, which suggests less a closed-door policy on immigration and more the creation of a system in which people seeking refuge can have their claims heard in a timely and fair way. [ED]

Firstly, Aquinas doesn't say there is an automatic response to manifest need to the exclusion of everything else. Aquinas clearly says that Prudence needs to be involved even  in these matters.  Not only prudence, but a Prudence formed which springs from a properly formed Christian conscience.

Secondly, what the author is trying to do here is to tie the orthodox positions of Aquinas with her position on immigration, thereby giving it a moral legitimacy. Furthermore, what the authors also do is ignore context, equating the roles and responsibilities of the private citizen with responsibilities of a member of government, whose domains of action and responsibility are totally different. Thirdly, while she states that prudence should regulate judgement in complex situations, but in the end she simply reduces the imperative to act to "urgent need." I don't think Aquinas would be impressed.

There also is an air of unreality in the article which equates the expansion of Christian virtue with a real world means to provide it. While virtue strengthens virtue through habit, an expansion of the virtue of compassion does not always come with the actual means to satisfy it. Every Beauty Pagent queen wants to alleviate world poverty and cancer, but they're still here, despite the sincerity of intention.  Love may be infinite by resources are finite the pain comes in dishing the resources out appropriately. Living in La La land is no help when there are mouths to feed and responsibilities to fulfill here and now.

The other day I heard of a family with four children who were of constrained means, they could only afford to send two of their children to good schools, and I know they're loving parents, but man, that's a hard call.

Likewise given a finite set of resources, Governments frequently have to make tradeoffs for the common good, which sometime injure other parties.  Governments may sometime--in acting for the common good--have to close the door, even for desperately needy people.

In the real world the allocation of resources by men of good will isn't just reduced to need. Other factors such as obligations, responsibilities. long term consequences and self-interest also matter. Opening your door to a serial killer in middle of a winter night may be helping the needy but its also insane.

What Aquinas and Christian common sense dictates is that prudence should regulate the expression of Charity and need is one of the factors of consideration. Sometimes Love hurts. And this is where we come, once again to trying to understand what Christian love is. If you conflate it with happy feeling then any outcome that causes painful feels is going to be evil. This is why they pull out the crying kid everytime they want you to donate money or support their policy and why they don't want to show the MS 13 member trying to get in.
They know that modern Christianity has become an exercise of feelings and not an act of considered goodwill.