Since Inauguration Day, as President Trump has sought to break the federal government, Christian leaders—tangling with Trump and, particularly, with his Vice-President, J. D. Vance—have wound up in a public dustup over the nature of charity. The dispute was brought into view on the Tuesday after the Inauguration, when, during a prayer service at the National Cathedral, Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., asked Trump to “have mercy” on people made fearful by policies he had vowed to enact: the mass deportation of migrants and the curtailing of legal protections for gay and trans people. The bishop’s challenge was a rare thing—a direct personal appeal to a figure whose office generally shields him from such attention. On immigration, her plea reflected something like a consensus position. Christian leaders, including Pope Francis and the National Council of Churches, which represents the views of more than three dozen Protestant and Orthodox groups, have denounced Trump’s rhetoric and policy proposals on immigration since he launched his first Presidential campaign, nearly a decade ago.
In January, following Trump’s reëelection, two Catholic archbishops, Cardinals Blase Cupich, of Chicago, and Joseph Tobin, of Newark, both of whom are close to the Pope, spoke out emphatically in support of immigrants—Cupich during a Mass in Mexico City, Tobin during an interfaith service in Newark. Cardinal Robert McElroy, of San Diego, whom the Pope has appointed to be the new archbishop of Washington, D.C., drew particular attention when he noted the need to balance a nation’s control of its borders with respect for “the dignity of every human person,” and said that “indiscriminate massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine.” He added, “We’ll have to see what emerges in the Administration.”
Soon after Bishop Budde challenged Trump, several Catholic bishops put out statements of a similar character. John Wester, of Santa Fe, affirmed the Christian imperative “to care for the resident and the stranger.” Mark Seitz, of El Paso, who is the chair of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Migration, criticized the halting of refugee resettlement, the disregard for the asylum process, the questioning of birthright citizenship, and the championing of “a so-called ‘unifying American identity.’” After the Administration announced the deportation raids, Seitz’s group joined the Catholic Health Association of the United States and Catholic Charities U.S.A. in a statement noting that “non-emergency immigration enforcement in schools, places of worship, social service agencies, healthcare facilities” and the like “would be contrary to the common good.” Four days later, a group of Quaker congregations sued the Department of Homeland Security, alleging that plans to raid houses of worship violated the constitutional “guarantee of religious liberty.”
The statements were strikingly temperate, but they were too much for J.D. Vance. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the Vice-President, a convert to Catholicism, said, “I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over one hundred million dollars to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” There followed a flurry of assertions and counter-assertions about Catholic social-service organizations and their budgets. The Church-funded Web site Our Sunday Visitor proposed that the hundred-million-dollar remark was a reference to $129.6 million that the bishops’ conference had received in 2023 for “refugee-related services,” and noted that the Conference reported spending $134.2 million on those services, or $4.6 million more than it received from the government.
The Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, then took up the issue on his weekly program on Sirius XM’s Catholic Channel. The Cardinal is no foe of the President: in a conference call that Trump held with religious leaders during the 2020 campaign, Dolan joked that his mother chided him for calling Trump more often than he called her. The Cardinal led the opening prayers at both Trump Inaugurations; in December, he presented no examples but told the Fox host Maria Bartiromo that Trump “takes his Christian faith very seriously.” Dolan didn’t speak against the President on his show—just the Vice-President, declaring that he was “hurt” by Vance’s “scurrilous” remarks. “You think we make money caring for the immigrants? We’re losing it hand over fist,” he claimed.
Vance converted to Catholicism just five and a half years ago, but he is suddenly one of the most visible members of the Church in the United States. He was tutored by men from the Dominican order and he was baptized at St. Gertrude, a Dominican priory in Cincinnati. It was apt, then, that, three days after Dolan’s remarks, he went on TV prepared with talking points from the most famous Dominican of all: the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas. Speaking with Fox’s Sean Hannity, Vance suggested that efforts to provide charity to immigrants, which are favored by “the far left,” contradict Catholic teaching. There’s “a very old school—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow-citizens in your own country, and then after that prioritize the rest of the world.” He was apparently referring to Aquinas’s idea of “ordered love,” or ordo amoris, set out in the “Summa Theologica”—an immense work, foundational to Catholic thought, that Aquinas left unfinished at his death, in 1274. And Vance seemed to be implying that Americans’ care for immigrants was at odds with it.
The Vice-President was immediately challenged on social media by Rory Stewart, the British academic, author, and former Conservative Party politician—and an Anglican—who called the remarks a “bizarre” and “pagan” inversion of the Gospel precept to love one another. Stewart added, “We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love.” Vance doubled down: “Just google ‘ordo amoris,’” he wrote on X. “Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?”
All this prompted another spate of commentary, this time on the nature of charity and how it is performed in American society today. On a semiweekly podcast hosted by the conservative Web site the Dispatch, Bishop Seitz suggested that Vance was poorly informed about both Aquinas and the Church’s work. “Certainly, no one would disagree that you have a primary responsibility to serve your most immediate family and then the community around you,” Seitz said, but he added that the Gospel, as in the story of the Good Samaritan, invites us to ask, “Who is my neighbor?”—thus challenging any notion that those responsibilities obviate obligations to help strangers in need.
Vance spoke out yet again, though. Addressing the International Religious Freedom Summit, an annual conference in Washington, D.C.—whose sponsors, this year, ranged from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the Church of Scientology to Meta—he alleged that the U.S. sends “hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars abroad to N.G.O.s that are dedicated to spreading atheism.” He offered no evidence, but he was apparently referring to U.S.A.I.D., the federal development agency that Elon Musk had taken first steps toward dismantling earlier in the week.
But framing Musk’s raid on U.S.A.I.D. as pro-religion ignores the fact that the agency is a robust supporter of religious relief groups. As Jack Jenkins of the Religion News Service noted in a report on the Freedom Summit, in recent years the non-governmental organization that has received the largest annual grants from U.S.A.I.D. has been Catholic Relief Services, a charity and development organization run by the U.S. Catholic bishops. C.R.S. was founded in 1943 to help survivors and refugees from the Second World War; it is based in Baltimore and now operates in a hundred and twenty-one countries. Last week, the president and C.E.O. of C.R.S., Sean Callahan, informed employees (nearly seven thousand, in a recent estimate) that the organization would have to scale back its aid efforts and lay off staff, owing to the reduction in funds that would follow the gutting of U.S.A.I.D. (A U.S. District judge temporarily blocked key aspects of the Trump Administration’s attempt to dismantle the agency.)
For more than half a century, C.R.S. has focussed its refugee efforts abroad. But its last domestic refugee project, in the first half of the nineteen-sixties, was a huge undertaking: the resettlement in Miami of nearly five hundred thousand Cubans fleeing Castro’s revolution. The political figure most closely associated with Miami’s Cuban American community today is Marco Rubio, now Trump’s Secretary of State, whose family members left the island beginning in 1956. Last Monday, Rubio declared himself U.S.A.I.D.’s acting director. So the proposed dismantling of the agency is to be abetted by an official from a community fostered by the very organization that will be most drastically affected by it.
