Pope Francis penned a letter to U.S. bishops (Feb 2025) explicitly rejecting that hierarchical ranking of love when applied to immigration, stating that “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests…” and invoking the parable of the Good Samaritan as a model of love open to all, without exception. Francis’ rebuke of JD Vance who appealed to the long and very well established principle of ordo amoris, where love and duty are not removed. Francis framed ordo amoris in a disordered way, that is not about measuring or rationing love but about extending love more widely and universally. The present pontiff, then as Cardinal Prevost, tried to correct Vance’s interpretation. Cardinal Prevost, as he was then, had in reality, doubled down on the error saying “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others”.
For clarity, St. Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana and Aquinas in the Summa are very clear: love is not undifferentiated. It has an order rooted in justice. One must love God above all, then those most closely entrusted to us — family, kin, neighbours, the community — and then the stranger. This is not optional; it is part of virtus ordinis, the very structure of morality. Aquinas explicitly says: “We ought to love some more than others… according to the order of charity.” (ST II-II, q.26, a.7).
Both Francis and Leo appeal, as part of their defence, to the Samaritan as if it abolishes order. But in the parable, the Samaritan helps the wounded man precisely because he encountered him within his capacity. The parable teaches mercy to the neighbour one actually meets — not that the whole order of natural obligations vanishes. St. Augustine himself interprets the Samaritan allegorically: Christ is the Samaritan. He heals humanity, but He does not command us to dissolve the order of natural loves. To deny ordo amoris is to deny subsidiarity: that duties exist first at the nearest level, then extend outward. This contrary “universalist” view, so beloved of many in the hierarchy, licenses governments and even bishops to sacrifice their people in the name of abstract humanity — whether through mass immigration, borderlessness, or policies that weaken families. Far from being merciful, it destroys the very communities that make mercy sustainable. Even the Vatican locks its doors, and employs the Swiss Guards for a reason.
Thomas Osborne, O.P., a Dominican Thomist, explained that ordo amoris is “non-negotiable Catholic doctrine”: love is rightly ordered, beginning with God, then one’s own, then the wider world. To deny this is to deny the natural law itself. Professor Robert George, the Princeton Catholic legal philosopher, defended Vance’s application, saying that the ordo amoris makes sense of why parents must feed their children before feeding the whole village — not out of exclusion but of justice. Catholic media like First Things and The Catholic Thing ran essays arguing that Vance’s interpretation was faithful to tradition, whereas the universalist “no boundaries” approach was sentimental but un-Catholic. Even in more mainstream outlets, journalists noted that Pope Francis’s letter and Prevost’s re-posts misrepresented Augustine, since Augustine clearly ranks loves in De Doctrina Christiana and in the City of God. The tone of the clergymen is sweet, but the sweetness conceals a toxin. It is the mirror-error of Jansenism.
Jansenism exaggerated severity: it stressed sin, narrowness, and exclusion to the point that mercy was eclipsed. Its language was sharp, cold, uncompromising. The faithful were crushed under scruples and harsh discipline, as if salvation were reserved for an elite few.
What we see now in much of the hierarchy is the opposite distortion: all warmth, inclusivity, and tolerance, but so boundless that truth and justice dissolve. Where the Jansenist priest would tell the sinner he is unworthy of Communion, the modern sentimentalist cleric tells him no sin exists at all. Where Jansenism starved the soul of mercy, this false sweetness starves it of conversion.
Both spring from the same failure: a refusal to hold together justice and mercy in their right proportion. The tradition — Augustine, Aquinas, Leo XIII — insists that mercy without order is cruelty, and order without mercy is tyranny. Jansenism erred on one side, the “pastoral tolerance” of our age errs on the other. Both damage souls, and both corrode nations. This is why it feels poisonous: the tone soothes, but the substance dissolves.
The history of the Church is marked not only by external persecution but by distortions of the Gospel from within. Each age seems to generate its own heresy, often a mirror-image of a previous one, proving that error is rarely eradicated but usually transposed into another key. In the seventeenth century, the scourge was Jansenism, a rigorism that exalted severity and presented the faith as a narrow path for a fearful elect. In our own age, the dominant error within clerical ranks is its opposite: a sentimental pastoralism that speaks with sweetness but undermines order, truth, and the very possibility of conversion. Both errors spring from a refusal to hold together justice and mercy. Both, in different guises, betray the ordo amoris, the divine order of love.
Jansenism, named for Cornelius Jansen and associated with Port-Royal, interpreted Augustine’s teaching on grace through a lens of fear and exclusivity. It stressed the corruption of human nature to such a degree that only a few were presumed capable of salvation. Sacramental practice was narrowed: Communion was restricted, confession delayed, devotion suffocated. In the Jansenist imagination, God was presented as a remote Judge, stern and selective, His mercy rationed and His grace sparingly given. This produced not saints but scrupulous souls, terrified of damnation, cut off from the consolations of the sacraments.
The Jansenist distortion was not wholly false. Its strength lay in its reminder of sin’s seriousness and the necessity of grace. But by severing grace from mercy, it mangled the Gospel. Instead of drawing sinners to Christ, it drove them away. Instead of strengthening nations by forming faithful households, it weakened them with sterile fear and inward division. Jansenism thus betrayed the order of charity by denying mercy its rightful place.
Our own age suffers from an error that appears opposite but is equally poisonous. Whereas Jansenism spoke with severity, today’s pastoral tolerance speaks with syrupy gentleness. The modern clerical voice assures the sinner that he is welcomed as he is, but does not call him to change. It preaches openness to the stranger but refuses to admit duties to one’s own. It invokes charity but empties it of order, treating universal benevolence as if it erased the natural hierarchy of loves taught by Augustine and Aquinas.
This distortion flatters rather than frightens. Its danger is not despair but presumption. It does not deny grace, but cheapens it into an automatic approval of all desires. Where Jansenism crushed souls with harshness, pastoral tolerance dissolves them in indifference. It turns bishops into chaplains of the age, repeating the slogans of humanitarianism rather than guarding the flock. Families are neglected, nations weakened, and the faith itself thinned into vague sentiment. The order of charity is betrayed here too: justice, which demands one love God first, one’s family and people next, and strangers after, is discarded as “exclusionary.”
The similarity between these twin errors lies precisely in their imbalance. Jansenism exalted justice without mercy; pastoral tolerance exalts mercy without justice. Both isolate one pole of charity and absolutize it. Both lead to spiritual ruin and social decay. A soul cannot live under the weight of Jansenist fear; nor can it thrive in the vacuum of sentimental permissiveness. A nation cannot endure if its people are crushed under rigorist scruples, but neither can it survive if its shepherds dissolve its identity in the name of boundless inclusion.
The tradition is clear: Augustine and Aquinas teach an ordered charity that embraces both truth and mercy. To parents is owed more than to strangers; to one’s nation, more than to distant lands; to God, above all. This is not chauvinism but justice. Yet it is also ordered by mercy: those outside are not despised but aided, instructed, and when possible, drawn into communion.
The true Catholic vision resists both extremes. It speaks with the firmness of Jansenism about sin’s reality, but with the gentleness that Jansenism lacked about God’s mercy. It extends welcome to the stranger, but without erasing duties to family and people. It insists on forgiveness, but only through repentance. It embraces universal love, but in the ordered form God inscribed in creation.
The task before the Church is not to swing between rigor and sentiment, but to recover the balance the Fathers and Doctors handed down. That balance formed Christendom: it built nations strong enough to receive strangers yet cohesive enough to endure, merciful enough to heal sinners yet firm enough to call them to conversion. It was this balance that Jansenism poisoned with harshness, and which modern pastoralism now poisons with sweetness.
The word “pastoral” once evoked the care of a shepherd, the vigilance of one who guards the flock against wolves, and the steady nourishment of souls with sound doctrine and the sacraments. In modern Church parlance, however, “pastoral” has been emptied of its traditional content and inflated into an ideology. Pastoralism no longer means guiding souls to truth but refusing to guide them at all. It has become a tone, a posture, a smile that blesses every choice in the name of accompaniment. If Jansenism was the disease of severity, pastoralism is the disease of indulgence; both kill the life of the Church, though by opposite means.
The essence of pastoralism is the displacement of doctrine by sentiment. Where the Fathers and Doctors insisted that teaching precedes application, pastoralists invert the order: they begin with feelings, situations, and exceptions, and then demand that doctrine conform. The shepherd does not lead; he follows the flock. The task of the bishop ceases to be guarding depositum fidei — the deposit of faith — and becomes managing perceptions, softening hard edges, and ensuring that no one ever feels excluded. In the name of “mercy,” pastoralism deprives sinners of the only true mercy: conversion.
To enable sin out of sentimentality is not mercy but betrayal, for it confirms a soul in the very disorder that endangers its salvation. When clergy or laity, out of misplaced compassion, endorse practices such as homosexual acts — explicitly condemned by Scripture and the Church’s perennial teaching — they do not spare suffering but deepen it, depriving the sinner of the chance to repent and be healed. True charity never lies: it names sin as sin, not to wound but to liberate. Sentimentality, by contrast, cloaks falsehood in soft words, leaving souls deceived and unprepared to meet the justice of God.
This posture corrodes the hierarchy of loves that Augustine and Aquinas so carefully articulated. To love rightly is to love in order: God first, family next, community and nation after, and only then the wider world. Pastoralism dissolves this order. It tells the father that his duties to his children are no greater than to strangers. It tells the ruler that the survival of his people is of no more account than abstract humanitarian ideals. It tells the priest that his duty to defend the faith of his flock must bow before the imperative to avoid giving offense. In this way, pastoralism hollows out justice under the pretence of charity.
The consequences are visible. Families collapse because sin is never named; children grow without discipline because authority is feared; nations lose coherence because their shepherds preach borderless compassion while neglecting their own peoples. Clerics speak the language of NGOs rather than the creeds, repeating slogans of “openness” and “inclusion” as if they were articles of faith. Instead of calling men to die to themselves, pastoralism canonizes self-expression. Instead of strengthening the Church to resist the world, it baptizes the world’s fashions and calls it dialogue. Even good priests, willing to be disliked enough so his flock have an opportunity to get to heaven are chastised.
Fr. Seán Sheehy, for example, a retired priest who returned to his homeland, and served his people with a blunt love that had the courage to name things as they are. When he stood in the pulpit of St. Mary’s in Listowel and preached against abortion, homosexuality, and the corruption of public morality, he was doing what priests have always been ordained to do: applying the eternal law of God to the lives of his flock. His words were true, inconvenient for many, but they were born of a shepherd’s heart — the refusal to flatter sin while souls slip into ruin. Yet instead of standing with him, his bishop distanced himself, apologizing for “hurt caused” and publicly rebuking his priest. In that moment, the scandal was doubled: first that sin was coddled in the name of sentiment, and second that a pastor who loved his people enough to speak truth was thrown under the bus by the very shepherd charged to protect him. Such episcopal weakness does not merely wound one priest; it plays recklessly with souls, signalling to the faithful that truth is negotiable and that doctrine must bend to popular taste. Fr. Sheehy’s courage exposed what many prefer to ignore — that when bishops fear men more than God, the flock is left defenceless, and the wolves rejoice.
To be clear, the greatest myth in Catholic circles today is that orthodox Catholics enjoy some type of sadistic appeal to the prospects of themselves going to hell. It is obviously absurd. Orthodox Catholics don’t seek to argue the realities of hell for any other reason that the truth. Christ Himself explicitly refers to hell around 11–13 times in the Gospels (depending on how one counts parallel passages), with additional parables and warnings that bring the total number of distinct sayings on eternal damnation to roughly 20 occasions. Dare we hope? No, dare you believe in a fiction. Orthodox Catholics, despite the framing, want as many souls as possible to get to heaven; that is love, the reverse is also true, any priest who plays irresponsibly with the destination of a soul, is a hater of that person, at least reckless. No parent would allow her child to eat Chocolate for dinner every day, a reckless parent thinking it contained milk and ruffage enough to sustain a healthy diet, is in neglect.
The irony is that pastoralism believes itself to be the antidote to rigorism. Jansenism strangled the life of the Church with fea