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Notes -
I was reading it in the context of debates about the aid budget. I admit I haven't watched the entire Fox News interview. Is there a transcript of it anywhere? I've only seen the tweet with a one sentence quote that blew up.
At any rate, I do stand by the idea that there's a lot of talking past each other. Here's the National Catholic Reporter arguing that Vance is wrong, but only rebutting a strawman. At least in the tweet I saw, Vance wasn't saying that love should be calculating or conditional; rather, he doesn't seem to have been talking about love in that sense at all. Here's R. R. Reno in Compact:
This seems like a helpful distinction to me. A Christian ought to love all people, i.e. regard all people with an attitude of impartial benevolence, or agape. But a Christian's concrete duties and responsibilities are ordered in a particular way, and proximity is one of many factors influencing those responsibilities.
Other factors include things like need or culpability. If my family member has a skinned knee and a total stranger is drowning in a river, the stranger's greater need outweighs the family member's relational proximity to me. Likewise if I caused a total stranger to receive an injury, I have a much greater responsibility to care for that injury. So Christian moral responsibility is not univariate, and proximity, however we construe that term, is only one relevant factor.
Am I steelmanning Vance a bit here? Perhaps - I haven't been able to find the full original interview, and Vance's snipes on Twitter aren't enough to get a nuanced idea of what he means. But I hope that reflection on Christian moral obligation is useful even beyond the quest to indict or vindicate a politician of the moment.
The National Catholic Reporter is a liberal/progressive "Catholic" publication. They have and do promote political positions completely at odds with Catholic teaching, including defence of abortion and IVF, among many other things. To the point where bishops have called on them to remove Catholic from their name. I wouldn't take them as representative of the faithul Catholic position. It's in their interest to misrepresent Vance. This is the polite way of describing the NCR.
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