Say what you will about the first two weeks of US president Donald Trump’s second term in office, which has seen a blizzard of presidential executive orders and is now handling the fallout of the tragic midair collision in the US capital, it has also certainly put the spotlight on Catholic social teaching.
Read more at Crisis magazine on JD Vance use of St. Thomas Aquinas
And even more from Catholic News Agency.
That’s largely due to the words of Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019….
Ever since Vance converted, he has been vocal about his Catholicism. Vance has also been and frank in his acknowledgment of how the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo, the North African bishop who lived from 354-430 and is universally recognised as the greatest of the Church’s Latin Doctors, have influenced him.
In a 29 January interview on Fox News, Vance spoke about the Trump policy on illegal immigration, and noted the president’s plan to deport millions of people didn’t conflict with his religious beliefs.
“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 neighbour 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 prioritise the rest of the world,” the vice president said….
Writing on social media platform X, Jesuit Father James Martin replied to the vice president’s interview by saying it misses the point of Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan.
“After Jesus tells a lawyer that you should ‘love your neighbour as yourself,’ the lawyer asks him, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ In response, Jesus tells the story of a Jewish man who has been beaten by robbers and is lying by the side of the road. The man is helped not by those closest to him (a ‘priest’ and a ‘Levite’), but rather by a Samaritan. At the time, Jews and Samaritans would have considered one another enemies,” Martin wrote….
Conservatives, however, were quick to point out Vance was just speaking of the ordo amoris – the “hierarchy of love” – an idea most famously articulated by Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
“In matters pertaining to nature, we should love our kindred most; in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens; and on the battlefield, our fellow soldiers,” Aquinas wrote in his Summa Theologica….
From the Catholic Herald
And Jimmy Martin always misses the point of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and St. Paul in Romans 1.
Martin will be a headlining speaker in a couple weeks at the heretical Anaheim RECongress.
I was happy to read today, that the Idaho House of Representatives has passed a resolution for a petition to the Supreme Court, to reverse their wrongful “gay marriage” 2015 decision, and restore the definition of Marriage as a union of one man and one woman. I have long been praying for this! The Catholic Church should have excommunicated SCOTUS Judge Anthony Kennedy, on this issue. And Jesuit Fr. James Martin also should long ago have been excommunicated, along with “Sister” Jeannie Grammick. There should be stern laws against “gay adoptions,” and stern laws prohibiting sex-ed and LGBT material, as well as pornographic material, for kids in the schools, libraries, or anywhere else. And no more Drag Queens with kids– that must be illegal, with stern punishments. I think VP J.D. (James David) Vance, as well as President Trump, may help with this. Children must be kept safe from all harm. And they must be taught the correct definition of Marriage, and what it means to be a Husband, Wife, and Father and Mother. That is very important. The RECongress should be terminated, and a worldwide standard Catechism program should replace it. That should have happened many years ago.
JD without question , he unlike martin , is a catholic and a man .
And straight.
tell Mahony to keep his mouth shut.
Doggone those pesky saints. They just won’t get with the program.
Mother Theresa said the same – first help your family, as sometimes it is easier to help a stranger than your own family. So true and so important. We have tent camps in most major cities in the USA – apartment rents and home ownership is incredibly high while sales tax, property tax, federal tax, state tax debilitate young adults and seniors alike….We need to regroup our debt or we will all “fall” together into bankruptcy…just what the demonic arena wants….
I bought bitcoin to save me from inflation due to currency debasement and government debt default.
It is so refreshing to have a real Catholic in high public office who lives his faith, as counterpoint to the parade of clowns wearing the Catholic label: Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Dick Durbin, James Carville, Anthony Fauci, etc…It seems like every time I look up the bio of a prominent democrat who is advocating immoral behavior, I learn that they were “raised” in a Catholic family, went to Catholic grade school, high school, college, etc. SMH.
Fr. James Martin SJ appears irredeemable at this point.
I agree. It’s so refreshing to have some real adulterers running this country, rather than bleeding heart liberals.
The director of Nefarious, when asked by Dan Burke if his choice to name the atheist psychologist in the movie James Martin was deliberate,just chuckled and replied, “You’ve been talking to me this long, and you need to ask?”
No more aid to Canada either. If they want to boo the American national anthem, they can try to get along without American subsidies. Trump is right. Canada needs us. We don’t need them for anything. America first, America best. America over all.
Canada doesn’t need us anymore or less than we need them. We don’t really send them a lot of subsidies. America First doesn’t mean that we isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. If we want to be safe we need to have a lot of friendly allies. Canada is a long-term ally of our country, they are not an enemy. They are not a threat to our nation and we should not treat them as such. Ten thousand trucks a day cross the Ambassador Bridge each day, carrying 300+ million dollars in goods. It keeps the American auto industry alive, it keeps the U.S. economy growing. So yes, it is easy to understand why some fans feel abused by a country to whom it has done no harm.
Leave it to Jimmy to slap J.D. with a lily and then mince off, pleased with himself that he silenced the room with his drop dead comeback.
It seems odd that a lawyer who relatively recently joined the Catholic Church would have a better understanding of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas than a lifelong Catholic and Jesuit priest. Of course, we are to love God first. And, we are to love everyone, including even our enemies. Yet, it seems one of the Church’s greatest theologians, Saint Thomas Aquinas, is right when he taught, “In matters pertaining to nature, we should love our kindred most; in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens; and on the battlefield, our fellow soldiers.” That order or priority or “hierarchy of love” is consistent with natural law and the gospel. Didn’t our Lord Jesus Himself, in His humanity, love His Mother, Saint John the Apostle and Saint John the Baptist more than Herod or Pilate (while loving them all)? You may say Jesus is God (which is true), so that’s not accurate. Yet, aren’t we to love our spouses and children more than we love (in action as well as abstraction) Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un?
Pray for our political leaders and our priests.
I don’t really care, James.
Soon enough JD will get to say, “I don’t really care, McElroy.” The President and VP just need to ignore the nobodies and wannabes who try to make a name for themselves by criticizing them. MAGA full steam ahead.
Reply to Restore correct definition of marriage: Sister Lucia of Fatima predicted that the final battle between Christ and Satan would be over marriage and the family. She also said, “those who work for the good of the family would face persecution and tribulation.
Jesus chose His words carefully. He said “Love thy neighbor”. Neighbor means someone near you. The command is not “Love mankind”. By extension “neighbor” includes a homeless person in your neighborhood.
The parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus does not define neighbor when asked. He tells the story of a man beaten and left for dead. Then he concludes his “answer” with a question: “Who was ‘neighbor’ to the victim?” He turns the original question around.
Clearly the victim was all three men’s neighbor. But who played “neighbor” to him? The Samaritan. The Samaritan may have been despised but it bears pointing out to Fr. Martin that the Samaritan was not a trespasser or undocumented.
Close reading shows that Vance’s observations from the Fathers are on the money.
It’s so appallingly laughable that the same Democrat Catholics who argue for “separation of Church and state” on the matters of abortion and gay marriage shout loudly about our “Christian duty to love the stranger” when it comes to scaling back or eliminating their pet government pork expenditures that pad the salaries of their leftist charities’ top executives.
Democrats are so laughably inconsistent and ignorant and foolish. Democrat Catholics are even worse.
Today, I was so thrilled to read in the news, that a DOGE committee is considering defunding PBS and NPR due to its systematically biased content. What wonderful news.