It may not be a surprise to hear a Catholic convert who was tutored by Dominicans quoting St. Thomas Aquinas. But certainly nobody had the Vice President of the United States publicly citing the Dominican saint and referring to his theology in Latin on their 2025 bingo card. But that’s exactly what happened last week.

For generations, we have lived under the rule of those who ... deride and despise the ordo amoris.
In a Fox News interview, Vance addressed concerns raised by Christians—and especially by U.S. Catholic bishops—over President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, particularly mass deportations. While Vance acknowledged that Christians have a moral obligation to treat others—including strangers and sojourners—with charity, he noted the “Christian concept” that charity must be rightly ordered, that it is, in fact, hierarchical.
“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,” Vance explained. He further observed, “A lot of the far Left has completely inverted that.”
The “Christian concept” Vance cited is called “ordo amoris” or the “order of love” and is well-grounded in Christian theology. Saints Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas both wrote extensively on the subject, hundreds of years apart. According to the saints, we have a higher obligation to love certain people based on our proximity to and relationship with them. “One's obligation to love a person is proportionate to the gravity of the sin one commits in acting against that love. Now it is a more grievous sin to act against the love of certain neighbors, than against the love of others,” Aquinas explained in his Summa Theologiae. He continued:
We must, therefore, say that, even as regards the affection we ought to love one neighbor more than another. The reason is that, since the principle of love is God, and the person who l...