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It is always embarrassing when you feel arrogant about a spitting victory for social media over the nature of Christian love, then the literal Pope comes and tells you that you are wrong.

This was the fate of Donald Trump’s second last week-no, not Elon Musk, but Vice President JD Vance. He turned from atheism to Catholicism in 2019, and he chose, as Saint Augustine, who was first written in the fifth century AD, on the idea on which this spas in the twenty -first century.

section Vans had to defend Trump’s policies, “America first.” As. Sean Hanity of Fox News said: “The American citizen has your sympathy first to your citizen colleagues.” There is this old school – and I think it is a very Christian concept. . . You love your family, then you love your neighbor, then love your community, then love your citizens’ colleagues in your country, and then, you can focus on the rest of the world and determine its priorities. “

Rorre Stewart, the British politician who turned into-CenterHe took a problem with “Take the Strange” in Vans, Description on x As “less Christian and more tribal and pagan”, and suggested that when “theologians” become, we must all feel anxious. Vanced (before some non -Christian fossils was made for sure about the intelligence rate in Stewart): “Just Google” Ordo Amoris “. . . . The idea that there is no hierarchical sequence of obligations that violates the basic proper sense. Does Ruri really think that his moral duties for his children are the same duties for a strange person who lives thousands of miles away? no one? “

I find this very interesting question, in terms of not only Christian faith but Secular ethics on a broader scale. I also think that there is nothing bad that the politician might eat with a theological or moral questions seriously. But this does not mean that Vans had the nature of Christian love correctly.

It was clear who was Pope Francis took the debate when he was published message To the American bishop on Monday. “Christian love is not a concentrated expansion of the interests that extend slowly to people and other groups,” he wrote. “correct Love arrangement It must be promoted is what we discover by constantly meditating the story of the “good Samaritan”. . . That is, by contemplating the love that builds an open brotherhood for everyone, without exception. “

Perhaps a sign of respect is that Vans, who wrote in 2020 that “many American Catholics failed to show the correct respect of the Papua, and the Pope treated as a political figure to be criticized or praised according to them”, in the absence of Backchat (unlike the border, Tsar Tom Human , Who told a television camera that “the Pope [sic] O Catholic Church’s reform. ”But, at the risk of appearing rudely, I am not sure of that pope You really wrestled with a slight difference of what Vans was; Stewart did not.

We can all think about people who appear more able to show sympathy with the suffering of those who live thousands of miles away – who make it easier for idealism as victims without blame – more than people who approach home who have different political opinions on perhaps their own. It is fair to criticize this motivation. Although it is very good for the Pope talk about “the brothers open to all”, it is ethically correct and morally appropriate to love your family more than to do a strange person. As the philosopher Bernard Williams booksThe man who should think if a stranger or his wife would be saved – when both are in danger, but only one can save – he had “a lot of thought”.

But what about when you need a stranger greater than your family members? This is the place that Vans does not have his head on the nuances, according to David Ferguson, a professor of deity at Cambridge University. While Thomas Akinas, who expanded the idea of ​​Augustine from Love arrangement Have we suggested that we have obligations to those close to us, not that, we should always give them to set their priorities. “Obligations can be canceled when someone is in greater need,” says Ferguson. “Excessive proximity can be proximity.”

The presence of politicians who express their interest in Christian theology publicly may not be a bad thing. The most harmful thing is when they seek to use religion as a kind of intellectual or moral cover, especially when they make mistakes. The Vice President’s Mustice is a symptom of the false and false jaws in a large part of the Maga project. Vans, clearly, is an intelligent man. But is it less disturbing than he thinks? Good . . . Is Pope Catholic?

jemima.kelly@ft.com