JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others.
This is from the man who would become Pope Leo XIV. I'm leading with it because it's probably the most idiotic thing he's publicly said (so far - one hopes forever), and I want to get get it out of the way first.
This comment was made in response to Vice President Vance's explanation of the administration's attempt to get a handle on the United States decades-long immigration problem. Because much of the budget of the United States bishops is provided from the central government itself, specifically in the form of moneys to be used helping immigrants, some bishops were taking it on themselves to criticize the administration's activity, in the public forum, specifically citing the stance toward illegal immigration as contrary to charity. Mr. Vance explained, in an interview on Fox News, the obvious truth that the Christian meaning of charity is moderated through a Christian concept of duty, by which we have a greater obligation to those in our immediate circle than to those who are more remote.
The thing about this concept of an ordering of charity is that it's so obvious, even within the mere natural observation of life, without the need for any theological insights, that one has to be rather an idiot to truly believe other than how Vance explained it in the interview.
Does that mean Pope Leo XIV is an idiot?
Maybe not. In fact, I rather suspect that Prevost didn't then believe what he was saying, and was just saying anything to try to undermine the actions of the Trump administration when it came to handling illegal immigration. This view of it isn't much better, because it makes Prevost out to be a liar.
So, whatever else he's said or done in the past, it woulds seem the man who is now the pope is on record as being either an idiot or a liar.
Without wanting to white-wash who Cardinal Prevost was (and therefore who Pope Leo XIV is likely to be), let me propose at least one more way of interpreting the abject idiocy of Prevost's comment:
When I was a young man, there were, among the guys I typically "hung with" at work, a couple who were "invested atheists." What I mean by that is that they not only didn't believe in God, but invested time coming up with argument to convince themselves of their rightness in not believing in God. My first exposure to this was during lunch, when the two were discussing it while they were joining me at the lunch table. They were talking about "the myth," and one of them was saying that "so-and-so asked, 'How do you explain the existence of the universe.'" The other interrupted to say (something even more idiotic than Prevost's answer to Vance), "that's easy: self-generation."
The point I'm getting to isn't about what they said, however. Since I was unaware of their ongoing (probably in an email list somewhere) conversation about atheism, I asked into it, starting by asking what they meant by "the myth." I forget what the exact answer was, but at one point, one of them asked, "Can you imagine something that's all-powerful, and yet so vile that it would ask people to worship it?"
Well, that seemed such an odd question to me, on so many levels, but I wanted to "score a point" by turning the question around in a way that used the general framing of the question while reversing the meaning. If I had been more interested in a conversation and less interested in appearing clever, things might have gone very differently. What I meant to ask is something along the lines of "Is creation so ugly to you, that you wouldn't want to worship its ultimate source, if that ultimate source were a person?" What came out of my mouth was "Can you imagine something so vile that you wouldn't worship it?" Unfortunately, that's not something to easily walk back from within the immediate context of the conversation. I was young and didn't have the wisdom and humility to be able to say "That was dumb - not what I meant." Even more, I felt (again, for lack of humility) that I had lost any initial footing I may have had, in any chance at becoming part of their ongoing conversation in whatever email group they had going on.
When the Trump administration was first executing its initial steps to get a handle on illegal immigration, I suspect a lot of people (perhaps including then-Cardinal Prevost) were so annoyed at Vance's ability to handily dismiss charges of the administration being "uncharitable," that they said things without thinking them through, just as I did at a work lunch table so many years ago. This may be what we were witnessing in Cardinal Prevost's remark.
Then, the pope is maybe not either strictly an idiot or a liar. But what is he?
At the very least, we know that he seems to be generally biased against the idea of nations having and enforcing immigration laws. We also know that he was instrumental in removing the goodly Bishop Strickland from his position in Tyler Texas, and in installing Cardinal McElroy, a known shelterer of criminal rapists, as the bishop of our nation's capital. He also invoked synodality in his opening speech as the pope, which is not a good sign.
On the other hand, he took the name Leo. The most recent Leo, Leo XIII, is the pope who authored Rerum Novarum in an attempt to establish a Christian framework for the world that had become industrialized and was seeing various problematic movements in response to some of the hardships that resulted from that industrialization. Among other things, Leo XIII re-affirmed the necessity of respecting private property, both as an institution and in its particulars, as well as absolutely condemning all forms of communism and socialism.
So, who knows? Of one thing we can be certain, from the example of Saint Paul: If Leo XIV is sincere in his desire to serve the Truth, then the Holy Spirit can work with that to transform him into whatever kind of pope Jesus wants for His Bride, the Church.