Patriotism, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once noted, is both a virtue and a vice. The virtue emanates from loyalty—in this case, to a nation—one of a group of loyalties that include family, friends, and community. On the other hand, the vice is that it is necessarily partial— celebrating the particular over the universal—thereby conflicting with contemporary liberal morality.
The tension between these two poles, between the concrete and the abstract, lay at the heart of a spat between U.S. Vice President JD Vance and some of his detractors last month, which even Francis, the first pope from the Americas, felt relevant to intervene in.
In a wide-ranging television interview for Fox News on January 29th, and prompted by a question from the host, Sean Hannity, Vance described as “very deranged” those who “feel more of a sense of compassion for illegal aliens” over their “fellow citizens.”
He described “an old-school and … very Christian concept” whereby “you love your family, and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
In response to those who lampooned his remarks on social media, the conservative Catholic convert Vance doubled down the next day with a message on X that further riled his critics. This stated, “Just google ordo amoris,” referring to a hierarchy first put forward by St. Augustine in the 5th century AD and further developed by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th.
Pope Francis entered the fray on February 10th through a letter to the bishops of the United States of America, focused on what he described as a “major crisis” there—the program of mass migrant deportations initiated by the Trump presidency. This conflates, he denounced, their undocumented and accordingly illegal status with criminality.
Almost every paragraph referred to his longstanding concerns for the plight of migrants, allowing just two brief caveats—“the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe,” and “the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration”—prior to emphasising a transcendent human dignity.
It is a masterclass in appearing equitable while taking sides, which then turned on Vance by expounding that the “true ordo amoris” is derived, not from “a concentric expansion of interests” by “a mere individual” but through our “constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest,” as revealed in the parable of the Good Samaritan.
But, as one Catholic commentator notes, while the Samaritan was both a stranger and from a different religious group to the victim whom he helped by the side of the road, by coming to him, they became proximate, and the Samaritan then supported him over others he could have helped further away.
Likewise, many condemning Vance prioritise migrants to the U.S. over those in greater need in the countries they came from, thereby displaying an implicit understanding that the concrete and immediate comes ahead of the abstract and remote. The Vatican itself, others noted, hardly treats intruders leniently.
The pope did not address the key point raised by Vance—that many in the U.S. seem to reject their own. Yet the universal love pointed to by the pope must surely apply to all to mean anything at all. He reserved his ire for one side, without pointing to the evident problems of the other. Nor did he comment on the many more migrant deportations under the Biden administration.
Significantly, Pope Francis failed to note the context of Vance’s remarks—a discussion piece on the murder of children by migrants. Rather, he simply affirmed the good when society “welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile” without, in his turn, reflecting on the inability at all levels to articulate what it is that migrants ought to be integrated into today.
No doubt, love is not a zero-sum game, and the pope may maintain that through loving God first and foremost, we can avoid the vice of prioritising one’s own over “the equal dignity of every human being.” But, as MacIntyre noted in his essay on patriotism, such liberal morality, by looking to avoid partiality, downplays and erodes social bonds with little by way of replacement.
Those bonds emerge organically, from attachment to experiences that forge a sense of loyalty to a community. It is only through such human connections that any morality can then be expected or demanded of us in the first place.
Liberal moralists may see patriots as dangerous for prioritising the particular. But patriots view those who liken themselves and others to abstract individuals as being citizens of nowhere, unwilling to fight for their community. Loyalty is a prerequisite to morality. And to attain genuine human solidarity in a rapidly militarising world, the loyalty that matters most today is patriotism.
