[2] The Order's three principal officers are counted as citizens, with other members retaining their existing citizenship.
[6] As of 2022, the Constitutional Charter of the Order states that it "carries out its charitable works for the sick, the needy and the refugees without distinction of religion, ethnicity, sex, origin and age".
In 2009, former Washington, D.C. mayor Anthony A. Williams withdrew his application for Order membership after members protested his support for abortion and same-sex unions.
[8] In a 2010 publication of the Order's Journal of Spirituality, Baron Guglielmo Guidobono Cavalchini, Delegate of Lombardy, wrote that a member of the Order should not accept "the modern habit of living together without marriage or homosexual unions".
[9] In a 2015 interview, Order patron from 2014 to 2023 Raymond Leo Burke (a largely ceremonial role) said that gay couples and divorced and remarried Catholics trying to live good and faithful lives were like "the person who murders someone and yet is kind to other people".