What The Hell America!

Sargent: Well, there are basically three lanes you can criticize Vance on, and I’d like to try to work through each of them. The first is the one you just said, which is that it’s not as if Trump and Vance actually recognize moral obligations to all Americans. Trumpism, and as you’ve written in one of your great pieces, is really all about casting a large segment of American citizens as an internal enemy and really, essentially, turning loose the state on them. So there’s that one. The second is that Vance basically, as you say, offers a miserly interpretation of Catholic teaching. But then there’s a third, which is that there’s no way to actually say that what Trump has done is in any sense an ethical obligation ranking outward, right? He suspended all refugee admissions. He’s ending protected status in the U.S. for hundreds of thousands of immigrants facing disasters in their home country, trying to deport millions who are not serious or violent criminals. They’re absolutely slaughtering foreign aid, creating deaths abroad, humanitarian horrors. Is there any way to describe that as a concentric ranking of obligations outward? It’s a foreswearing off of ethical obligations entirely. That’s MAGA.

McManus: Yeah, absolutely. There’s always a way of defending anything, right? There are people who have defended Nazism, fascism, you name it, over the course of history, Marxist authoritarianism. But I think that any person who is genuinely concerned to get Catholic social teaching, or just basic ethics, right will look at what the administration is doing and say, Not no way, not no how. Just to give one good example, one of the greatest Catholic thinkers of our current age is Charles Taylor from McGill University, formative influence on me amongst others. Taylor has reprimanded the Trump administration time and time again for a lack of ethical seriousness. And that’s not meant to be a joke, right? It’s not like there’s anything funny about this. These are people who just think about the basic moral duties that most of us have and see them as not applying to them. And I think that any person who is concerned to be a good person—let alone a good Christian—should take a pause and think about whether or not it’s right to support this administration given all that.

Sargent: OK, I want to talk about what Pope Francis said about Vance in the context of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In his letter criticizing Vance’s ordo amoris statement, Francis questioned the whole ethical schema by saying that an extended meditation on the Parable of the Good Samaritan will undermine what Vance was saying. Now, what I took from that—and again, I was raised godlessly, and I don’t claim to have a lot of knowledge of this topic, but what I took from what Francis was saying is that the good Christian attempts, through reflection, to expand his or her appreciation of the situation of others, to evermore distant and far away rings of strangers and others because of the dignity of every human person. Can you talk about that? Is that an interpretation of the Parable of the Good Samaritan that’s fair? And doesn’t it cut pretty strongly against MAGA generally and against Vance’s theology particularly?