The sense of Catholic unity didn’t last long. Less than a week after Vice President JD Vance shared the inauguration stage with a senior Catholic cardinal, Vance picked a fight with the top American leaders of his church.
The new vice president, a Catholic convert, accused the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops of resettling “illegal immigrants” in order to get federal funding. New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who gave the invocation shortly before Vance took his oath of office, denounced the remarks as “scurrilous” and “nasty.”
Vance has claimed that a concept from medieval Catholic theology – “ordo amoris” in Latin – justifies the Trump administration’s America-first immigration crackdown. He contended that the concept delineates a hierarchy of care – to family first, followed by neighbor, community, fellow citizens and lastly those elsewhere.
Several scholars say Vance is promoting a simplistic misreading of the concept and that Catholic teaching requires the helping of strangers in urgent need.
But Vance received support from others, particularly those in a largely Catholic movement he identifies with, known as postliberalism. It combines a social conservativism with a belief in using the power of the state to promote Christian values and build community. The movement’s leading thinkers have advocated for precisely the sort of sweeping “regime change” underway in the Trump administration, cheering its largescale cuts to the federal agencies and workforces deemed antithetical to these goals.
The Catholic rift comes as leading bishops applauded some of the new Trump administration initiatives. Statements from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops welcomed executive orders supporting “ school choice,” rolling back federal support for gender transitions and requiring foreign agencies receiving U.S. aid to certify that they don’t provide or promote abortion.
The change of administrations seems to mark a tectonic shift in Catholic power in Washington. Democrats Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi – liberal, Mass-attending Catholics who supported abortion rights, prompting some bishops to oppose their receiving Communion – are gone from the White House and House speaker’s chair, respectively.
Source: Washington Times
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