Pearls and Irritations

Five years ago, J.D. Vance, who is now the vice-president of the United States, received the Sacraments of Initiation at St Gertrude Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The Dominicans to whom the parish has been entrusted presumably instructed him regarding the basic tenets of Catholic Christianity, stressing that love is the basic reality of the universe and, therefore, the chief virtue to which we are called.

So, I hope that those who catechised him and have preached to him are embarrassed that the Pope himself has felt it necessary to re-catechise Vance regarding love.

Vance falsely claimed that American bishops who criticise the Trump administration’s draconian actions against undocumented aliens do so because the bishops make money from various support programs for immigrants. He has, since then, offered a view of love that he claims is based upon an ordo amoris (order of love) that sets degrees of love and thus justifies the mistreatment of the weak. Vance translates “ordo” as order in the sense of first, second, third though a better Englishing would probably be “standard”.

On 10 February, Pope Francis sent a letter to the American bishops, encouraging them to speak on behalf of those who live in fear because of the US Government’s ham-fisted way of dealing with the issue of illegal immigration through mass deportations. In the letter, the Pope explicitly, though without naming the vice-president, refutes Vance’s novel view of Christian love.

“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

In response to Pope Francis, another Catholic in the Trump administration, Tom Homan, the so-called “border czar” whom Trump appointed to “be in charge of all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin” told the Pope, “stick to the Catholic Church.”

How is it that Catholics can without qualms defy and ridicule their bishops and even the Pope while advocating and implementing policies that are blatantly racist and blind to the individual rights and stories of the children of God who are victims of those policies?

Something is very wrong with the Catholic Church in the United States. The majority of Catholics who voted in the last national election cast their ballots for an adulterous, convicted felon and his party that abets racism and brags about bullying the rest of the world. How did this happen?

If fingers of blame are to be pointed, the prime suspects must be the bishops of the United States, the same group to whom Pope Francis sent his missive.

While church leaders in other nations have tried to present the Gospel in its fullness for the modern world, the American Church management has de facto limited itself to one matter — abortion. Abortion is indeed an injustice that requires a response from Christians, but it is not the sole one.

The environmental crisis threatens everyone. May 2025 will mark the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ that made “care for our common home” a major mission of the church. While the Japanese bishops, among others, have taken the message to heart and made it a theme for their preaching and teaching, mention of the encyclical and the challenge seldom if ever comes from preachers and the bishops’ conference in the United States.

Of course, the failure of bishops to deal with clerical sexual abuse and the clericalism that abetted it, along with the financial strain on parishes called upon to pay for that negligence, have greatly reduced the number of people who will hear, let alone heed, anything the bishops say.

Individual bishops or preachers may from time to time speak about American racism, violence, treatment of the nation’s original inhabitants, sexual exploitation, abuse of migrants, militarism, economic disparities, pollution, lack of access to healthcare, failing education system, suicide, addiction, acquiescence in international injustices, disease, hunger and more. However, as a group the bishops have declared that their “pre-eminent priority” (a weird locution, “number one number one”) is abortion and they have not used their common voice to give guidance on other matters.

That abdication of responsibility for proclaiming the Gospel in its entirety has resulted in the alienation of Catholics who want to see the Church act as a prophetic presence in society instead of being a single-issue sect.

Other Catholics, uniformed and unled, begin to think that so long as they are against abortion they have fulfilled their baptismal responsibility to be a light in the world’s darkness.

Now that the American bishops are at last beginning to speak as a group to the situation of migrants it is no surprise that there are Catholics who deride them. The bishops are seeing the result of their single-minded obsession.

If the bishops had stressed the social teachings of the church, had they spoken more forcefully about the rights of all God’s children born as well as unborn and led the community of believers to be a light to the nation, would the baptismal preparation and preaching offered at Vance’s church have given him a different approach to the problems of governance?

The managers of the Catholic Church in the United States have neglected the proclamation of the Gospel in its fullness and narrowed their vision and voice to a single issue that played into the hands of those who benefitted from scanting so much else.

The American bishops as a group have failed and that failure has deprived them of their voice. Pope Francis has told them some of what they must do to regain it.

We can only hope that their failure will be taken to heart by them and others around the world who are ordained to lead the church rather than merely manage it.

Republished from UCAnews, Feb 13, 2025

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