A New Catholic Reformation

The debate over the reform of immigration laws has come to South Carolina with great urgency, and most of the Republican candidates for governor support an approach similar to that taken in Arizona. In the service of suggesting a way to hold in creative tension the various principles that are in competition with each other in this debate, I offered a column to the Greenville News which they published on 8 May 2010 . Here is the text of that column: What should we do about the millions of people who live and work in the United States illegally? This is a vexing question with political and moral dimensions, but to sort through these questions, we first need to think clearly about the principles at stake in our ongoing debate. In the service of thinking clearly about immigration reform, I suggest these principles. First, every sovereign nation has the right and duty to secure its borders and regulate entry of those who are not its citizens. This is a fundamental principle of natural l...

One of the strangest and saddest stories in the Catholic Church in the past century is the rise and fall of the Legion of Christ, a community of priests, and its associated lay movement, Regnum Christi, both founded in Mexico by a charismatic con man named Marcial Maciel. For many years there were scattered stories of Maciel's degenerate life: drug abuse, sexual abuse of his own seminarians, misuse of funds given to the communities he founded, etc. As it turns out, the truth is far worse than anyone imagined, and it is now clear that this man was an evil sociopath who for decades deceived nearly everyone he ever met, including Pope John Paul II. Maciel died in 2008 (apparently without repentance or remorse for his vicious crimes), but the communities he founded endure. And now the question arises, Whither the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi? Over at First Things, George Weigel (a longtime friend of many fine priests in the Legion) takes on that question: Next Acts in the Legion...

Jody Bottum, peerless essayist and editor of the indispensable First Things, has a brilliant exploration of anti-Catholicism in the Weekly Standard. It is a long piece of work but well worth reading every word:  Anti-Catholicism, Again