Pope Takes Issue With JD Vance

Pope Francis issued a major rebuke on Tuesday to the Trump administration's plans for mass deportation of migrants, warning that the forceful removal of people purely because of their illegal status deprives them of their inherent dignity and "will end badly." Francis took the remarkable step of addressing the US migrant crackdown in a letter to US bishops in which he appeared to take direct aim at Vice President JD Vance's defense of the deportation program on theological grounds, reports the AP. The Argentine Jesuit and President Trump have long sparred over migration, including before Trump's first administration, when Francis famously said anyone who builds a wall to keep out migrants was "not a Christian."

• Francis' letter: "The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution, or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability," he wrote. "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."

• Vance's theological take: The Catholic convert has defended the crackdown by citing a concept from medieval Catholic theology called "ordo amoris." He said the concept delineates a hierarchy of care—to family first, followed by neighbor, community, fellow citizens, and lastly those elsewhere.
• Francis' response: "Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. The true ordo amoris ... is the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception."
• Response: David Gibson, director of Fordham University's Center on Religion and Culture, said Francis' letter "takes aim at every single absurd theological claim by JD Vance and his allies in conservative Catholicism." "This is the pope also directly countering misinformation about the Catholic faith that is being expounded by the Catholic vice president," Gibson added.
• Response, II: In Crisis Magazine, Eric Sammons said Vance was merely drawing on the broader teaching of the Church to insist on loving things in an order: "Every love, even the love of neighbor, must be ordered beneath the love of God."

(More Pope Francis stories.)