What would Jesus do?

Jesus: Love your neighbor.

Man asks: And who is my neighbor?

Jesus: The stranger who needs kindness and mercy.

Luke said that Jesus answered the question of who was a neighbor and who deserved love with a parable. Jesus told the story of the "good Samaritan"

College classmate Erich Almasy wrote a long comment to my post yesterday, the one in which I asserted that the pope might be a Christian. After all, the pope seems to believe that Christians have an obligation to act with kindness and mercy toward “the least of these brothers of mine," i.e. the poor, the sick, and the refugee. Isn't that what Christians are supposed to do?

Not in the minds of some MAGA supporters of Trump. They are at odds with the Trump agenda.

Church-going American Christians supported Trump. They are 72 percent of the electorate and he received 56 percent of their votes. Trump had a get-tough agenda. Stop being a patsy, America. Look out for number one. Eliminate food and AIDS medicine in Africa. Reduce the cost of the safety net at home. And as for immigration, stop the asylum-seekers and people fleeing poverty, and do it with optics that show we mean business. Frog-walk people into hell-hole never-leave prisons. Shave their heads. Let people see how hopeless and miserable we have made immigrants' lives.

Vice President JD Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism, added to the public debate on the duty of Christians by suggesting that Christians have a widening circle of affection, starting at home and attenuating out toward strangers, owing them less and less.

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Erich joins Catholic theologians in saying that Vance has it wrong. Miserly selective love misses the whole point of what Jesus taught.

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

Christians and Christianity have had a tough time living up to the moral principles of their namesake. Pogroms against Jews and Romany, Crusades against Cathars and Muslims, and genocide against French Huguenots, Irish Catholics, and German Protestants. American Christians have been even worse. The sixteenth-century Spanish Catholics took vibrant civilizations in México and Peru and turned them into charnel houses. The 25-30 million people in México in 1521 became two million within 80 years due to pestilence, war, and starvation. At least the Spanish Catholic Church debated whether indigenous peoples were the children of Adam and Eve and whether Aristotle was right about “natural slavery.” The good Christians of Jamestown and Plymouth believed God ordained them to displace and destroy the tribes they encountered. They pointed to the villages and fields left empty by the measles and smallpox they brought as God’s proof.

The Catholic convert JD Vance recently referenced St. Augustine and his concept of “virtus est ordo amoris,” translated as “virtue is based on the order of love.” To Vance, this means love of family, neighbors, and country. Everyone else is excluded, especially immigrants. If the new pope’s tweets are legitimate, he has rejected Vance’s argument as not only misunderstanding St. Augustine but Christianity in general. Since the Pope has led the Order of St. Augustine twice, I’m betting he knows what he’s talking about. Watching what happens to current Christian thought and practice under a pope committed to returning to the founder’s ideals will be fascinating.