This popinjay Jebbie, James Martin, is usually wrong. Doesn't stop him from mouthing off, though. Here's the latest:
[Vice-President] Vance appeared on Fox News’ Hannity program, during which he explained the duty of governments to prioritize the common good of their own citizens before turning to the rest of the world.
“There is a Christian concept 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, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance noted, summarizing classic teaching by Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas on the order of love....
Since it was J D Vance, Martin just had to pop off:
...Father Martin jumped into the fray, insisting that Christians should love everyone equally without favoring anyone.
“Jesus’s fundamental message is that *everyone* is your neighbor, and that it is not about helping just your family or those closest to you,” the priest contended on X. “It’s specifically about helping those who seem different, foreign, other. They are all our ‘neighbors.’”...
He's wrong, of course.
...Augustine acknowledged that it is right and proper to love family members and countrymen more than strangers, without letting this rightly ordered love justify selfishness or injustice. In that same work, Augustine taught that political leaders should prioritize the good of their own citizens, since this is their primary responsibility...
So happens that Bp. Burbridge made exactly the same point yesterday. But there's more, and notice the word "order" in Thomas' teaching:
... Thomas Aquinas taught that ordo amoris means allocating a greater degree of love to family members, close friends, and countrymen over distant acquaintances or strangers. While Christians are called to love everyone, he wrote, even our enemies, we have a higher duty to love those nearest to us.
Political rulers, he wrote in his Summa Theologica, must act as stewards of the public good, ensuring order and well-being for their people, since they have a duty to prioritize the common good of their own citizens....
Order is the first rule of the universe.
Those with a grave dis-order have a hard time seeing that and understanding its implications.
1 comment:
Do we all not know those who busy themselves with charitable works and yet neglect their families? They are informally called communal narcissists.
As we all know it can be much harder to be charitable to those right in front of us than those far off and unknown to us.
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