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Papa don’t preach! It’s not every day that the Supreme Pontiff, the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion souls on earth, deigns to weigh in on a social media spat involving the vice president of the United States. But Pope Francis is no ordinary pontiff — and he’s just launched an extraordinary broadside against the new Trump administration, including a clear rebuke of J.D. Vance over his recent Twitter row with the British politician-cum-podcaster, Rory Stewart.
Last week, as Cockburn noted, J D Vance appeared to “pwn,” as the kids say, Stewart in a row over Christian principles and the issue of immigration. “Google ‘ordo amoris,’” Vance told the equine-mouthed Stewart on X, as he cast an uncharitable (albeit accurate) aspersion on Stewart’s intelligence quotient.
Yet Francis, the Servant of the Servants of God, has just written an extraordinary letter to his US bishops, denouncing the Trump administration’s “mass deportations” policy as an affront to human dignity and insisting “the true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the Good Samaritan… that is, by meditating on the love that builds fraternity open to all, without exception.”
It is, of course, no coincidence that Francis cited the very teaching that Vance has mentioned on social media just a few days earlier. Vance’s point, contra Stewart, was that, according to the Augustinian idea of a ladder of love or charity, one’s loyalty to one’s family, neighbor or country is necessarily greater than one’s duty to love people from other lands. “The idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense,” he said. But Francis argues that “worrying about personal, community or national identity… easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion for truth.”
Pope Francis also told the US bishops that he had “followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations. The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”
Stewart could not stop himself from quote-gloating on X that the Supreme Pontiff has sided with him over J.D. Vance, a devout convert and Mass-going Catholic.
Waiting for @JDVance (and the British right wing media?) to say that the Pope too had misunderstood the message of Christ…. https://t.co/wSVnChcZos
— Rory Stewart (@RoryStewartUK) February 11, 2025
But the Pope seems quite deliberately to be setting himself on a collision course (or ordo odii, if you will) with the Trump administration, even though (perhaps because) Trump and Vance won the Catholic vote by a clear majority in November. As Damian Thompson has noted in the upcoming edition of The Spectator monthly, Francis’s decision to appoint Cardinal Robert McElroy, the bishop of San Diego, as the new Archbishop of Washington was a conspicuous attempt to show his contempt for the new regime in America’s capital. According to Thompson, the appointment was a “tit-for-tat” move against Trump following the president’s selection of Brian Burch, founder of the uncompromisingly pro-life (and pro-MAGA) organization CatholicVote, to be his ambassador to the Holy See. Expect, then, relations between Rome and the White House to go only further south from here.
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