Does Christian love require that we love all people equally? Some say yes. They imagine love as a boundless sea, flowing in all directions, touching every shore equally. There is something true about that. God’s love is infinite and there is nothing in creation that is not touched by it. That is perhaps an accurate image of Divine Love as certain pre-Christian thinkers might frame it. But this is not love as it is revealed to us in Sacred Scripture. It is not the way of things from the Judeo-Christian perspective. In addition to this general love, there is also a particular and special love and this love has an order. It follows a path. It is structured and intentional, like a river carving its way through the land.
Human love reflects this duality. Particular and personal love follows what the Catholic tradition calls the ordo amoris—the order of love. Not all are loved the same, nor should they be. If love is to be true, it must first be rightly ordered. As a married man put it to me once, “so what you are saying, Father, is that I must love my neighbor, and I must love my wife, but I am not to love my neighbor’s wife like I love my wife.” He had understood.
The concept of ordo amoris entered the public discourse in a striking way recently when the Vice President, JD Vance, in a recent interview, invoked it as a guiding principle for national and personal life. His remarks drew both admiration and criticism. Some clerics embraced his articulation of the classical doctrine, recognizing in it a call to restore sanity to love—an affirmation that charity must begin at home. Others, including Fr. James Martin, SJ, pushed back. Fr. Martin, referencing the Parable of the Good Samaritan, argued on X that Jesus’ message is precisely that love must reach beyond the familiar, embracing even the stranger. In his reading, Jesus points to the Samaritan precisely because he shares no kinship with the beaten man on the side of the road. He wrote:
“So 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. It’s specifically about helping those who seem different, foreign, other. They are all our ‘neighbors.'”
But does the Good Samaritan negate the natural hierarchy of love, or does it call us to a higher sense of charity without dissolving our first responsibilities?
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, that great doctor of love, spoke of love as a journey. He saw it grow, deepen, take on new meaning as it ascends toward God. At first, love is selfish—crude and grasping. This is love of self for the self’s sake, an immature kind of love. Realizing sooner or later that self-love is insufficient, the self turns to God, but only for what God can do for it. This is love of God for the self’s sake, self-interested faith. Higher still, love moves beyond the self and begins to love God for His own sake. This is the beginning of charity. The final stage, the highest state, is when one loves oneself as God loves us, embracing God’s will for our lives and purified of whatever stands in opposition to God’s love. This is love of self for God’s sake, a sanctified love.
But even as love rises, it does not become indiscriminate. Saint Thomas Aquinas, ever the clarifier, saw that love is not a shapeless mist but a well-built house. The foundation must be laid first. The walls must go up in the right order. A roof placed before the walls is no roof at all. He tells us plainly: we are bound to love those closest to us before we love the stranger.
That is not selfishness. It is not insularity. It is the divine order, written into the fabric of creation. A man owes his life to his parents before he owes it to the world. He owes his heart to his wife and children before he offers it to his neighbor. The bonds of blood and duty are real. They are sacred. And when they are ignored, the world grows cold.
Yet there is a certain confusion apparent in modern discourse that suggests that to love truly is to love all equally, without distinction. This is disordered—it denies nature, history, the very instincts placed within us by God. A mother who neglects her child to care for a stranger is not virtuous. A man who abandons his homeland for an abstract global good is not noble.
This is not a rejection of charity. The Christian heart is expansive, always reaching, always giving. But there is wisdom in the order of things. A man who does not first love his own cannot love others well. A nation that does not care for its own people cannot be a light to the world. There is a reason why Scripture warns: “If anyone does not provide for his own, especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8).
That is the crux of it, isn’t it? Love begins at home. It starts with the child reaching for his mother’s hand, with the father bending down to lift his son, with the siblings who share the same table, the same name, the same blood. It radiates outward, yes, but never by abandoning its center.
Some will ask: what of the saint who gives his life for the stranger? What of the missionary who leaves home and country behind? These are high callings, acts of perfection. But they do not undo the natural order. They transcend it. The saint does not reject the family bond—he offers it up, in sacrifice, to God. That is an extraordinary love, not an ordinary duty.
Look around. See what happens when love is disordered. Families neglected. Communities fraying. Nations adrift, their people rootless, more attached to vague causes than to their own. A world where the personal is traded for the political, where duties close at hand are ignored in favor of grand gestures to those far away. It is a world that has forgotten the ordo amoris.
Saint Bernard knew better. Saint Thomas knew better. The Church, in her wisdom, has always known. Love is not vague. It is not random. It does not flatten the world into one great mass. It is structured, personal, real. Love rightly, and the world is set aright. Love blindly, and it falls apart.
Fr. Joseph Hudson, a Benedictine priest of Clear Creek Abbey, studied philosophy before entering the cloister in 2008. In 2019 he went to Rome to earn a Licentiate in Sacred Theology at the Angelicum, later teaching at Clear Creek. In 2023, he returned to Rome to pursue a doctorate.