Cato Institute thoughts

[published in Muddy River News, June 24, 2026]

When I was growing up, the Catholic press, which was all we used to read in our Catholic world in Decatur, Illinois, was always attacking an association called “Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.”   If the Cato Institute had existed back then, our press would have had problems with it too.

The Cato Institute says unpopular things. If I had to summarize its philosophy, I would say that it believes that governments at all levels should do as little as possible. Catholic Social Teaching (in what it calls the "principle of subsidiarity") would agree, but would disagree about where the “as little as possible” line should be drawn. 

Recently I began reading daily news comments put out by the Cato Institute. I do things like that because, as a professional religious, I believe in mortification. Fasting is out of style, so I replace fasting with trying to listen to both sides of political debates.

Reading the Cato Institute is my daily penance. But on June 10 I read something I Iiked. In the Institute’s daily online message I read: “Courts have found DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] has likely violated at least the 1st, 4th, 5th, 10th, and 14th amendments to the US Constitution, as well as the spending power, the taxing power, and the writ of habeas corpus.”

The DHS has been threatening and upending the lives of millions of our fellow Americans, including some in Quincy. It has taken people into custody without judicial recourse, separated parents from their children so quickly that a child can go to school one day and come home without a parent. Then it has stored the parent in facilities that are little more than  concentration camps. Sometimes the parents get sent back to a country from which they fled because cartel violence had made life impossible for them there.

This is not America. This is not the home of the free. This is not “securing our borders.” We need to make our government stop doing it.

Pope Leo says that governments and businesses should always start by respecting the dignity of individual people. Even if a person is in our country without papers, the DHS must treat that person, and that person’s loved ones, with the dignity due to every human being. The rule should always be: Respect! Respect! Respect!

 

Brother Joe Zimmerman (Fr. Joe Zimmerman)

 

Unconditional Love

    The term has bothered me for a long time: “unconditional love.” To me, the term says that someone, usually God, is not able to not love. That means that God’s love is not free. But the most beautiful thing about God’s love is that it IS free. God does not have to love us, but God still does love us, freely.

    Theologians a few centuries ago got into an argument about the issue. They said that God is all-knowing. That means that God knows in advance what we human beings will do. But the theologians also said that human beings are free. That means that no one can know what a human being will do in the next moment, not even God. In other words, either God is not all-knowing, or we are not really free.

    The theologians argued about this for a century and then gave up.

    Some psychologists say that nothing we do is really free, that we are under so many different kinds of pressure that the experience of doing something freely is an illusion.

    Two things go against that view. First, the experience of doing some things freely. And second, many human plans have crashed and burned because the planners assumed that the people they wanted to control could be controlled by rewards and punishments.

        A psychologist named B.F. Skinner was popular in the 1960’s. He argued that all behavior is stimulus-response. He said that we can program society so that people will always do the right thing. Criminologists in Illinois tried to build a juvenile corrections institution (called “Valley View”) on that theory. The young offenders would be rewarded for correct behavior, and punished for bad behavior, and would become model citizens. We never hear about Valley View today. Surely if the model had been effective, corrections institutions all over the country would have adopted it. Controlling prisoners with treats must have made them feel like dogs.

    But we still punish people in prisons, because we think that will make prisoners do what we want them to do. The strategy does not go well.

    Influence is the ability to talk people into doing what you want them to do, without threatening them with punishment if they don’t do it. Political power is the ability to punish people who do not do what you want them to do. Political power loses its power when people accept the punishment rather than obey the orders. That is the basis for choosing nonviolent resistance  instead of violent revolution.

    God is not a politician. God loves us freely, and created us so that we can love God freely in return. That is the basis of our dignity as human beings. The smallest child can do that.

    We can say that God will freely never stop loving us, but we should not say that God’s love is unconditional.

Curiosity kills cats

        There was a proverb I used to hear when I was a kid: “curiosity killed a cat.” Lesson: “don’t get too curious—you can get hurt.”

        I am sad that the saying has become the motto for too many religious people, of all religions.

        The motto is bad. The Lord made us curious.

        Second bad motto: “People need certitude.”

        Certitude is a scientific mirage. Maybe it started with Descartes. He thought the only thing he could be certain about was that he was able to think. “I think, therefore I am.” But ever since, some people have gone off on the crusade to acquire certain knowledge. We call some of them “scientists.” But there are other kinds too. We call them “religious people.”

        Science is story-telling qualified by observation. Careful observation, like what we can do with a microscope, leads us to modify older stories we have told. They used to say that cholera was caused by bad air. When they could observe water with a microscope, the story changed: cholera is caused by microscopic bugs in the water. The effect of the changed story was miraculous—cholera disappeared. The miracle led people to look for certitude through science instead of religion.

        We ended up with a battle of certitudes.

        Some old poet, I think Alexander Pope, said “a little learning is a dangerous thing.”

        Both science and religion have men and women of little learning. They are the people who expect certitude from either science or religion. Religious traditions wisely expect “faith,” which is to know things without being certain about them. Science can lead people to believe that science gives certitude, or at least more certitude than religion gives. That is misguided faith in science.

        Both science and religion have people who know that we cannot have certitude. Such people acknowledge that even if they cannot have certitude, they believe that what they are doing can be good for people. They both operate with the assumption that faith can live side by side with questioning, with curiosity.

        For the last couple of hundred years, ever since people began applying scientific observation to the Bible, it has seemed that science corrodes faith. Seminaries can turn out sceptics, who go about destroying religious faith and emptying the churches. The sceptics make two mistakes: they think that science can give us certitude, and they think that religion should give us certitude. By making certitude a pre-requisite for the good life, they distort science and destroy religion.

        The thing is, we are all human beings who live by the worlds that the people around us create. We live by the stories that our tribes believe. Scientists cannot work without a community of fellow scientists—we call them “peer reviewers,” and their very existence tells us that nothing we publish is free from critique. Religious people cannot operate without a community of fellow religionists. Religion without community can become magic. There is no philosophical tradition (“natural law”) or infallible authority (the pope) to tell us which religious statements are true. 

        The fragility of knowledge does not lead to chaos. There is no way for a coach to develop a foolproof way to win games, yet we continue to play games. Games are rewarding. When they cease to be rewarding for players or fans, we modify the rules.

        The experience of “reward” in games is a good analogy for what religious people call “life.” Games are rewarding when the players treat each other with respect; disrespect can get you thrown out of the game. They are rewarding when each player can lose—every player is vulnerable. They are rewarding when people continue to play even after they lose—they are faithful to the game and its players. Respect, vulnerability and faithfulness are the components of love.

        Games do not offer certitude. Science does not offer certitude. Religion does not offer certitude. Yet all three are worth doing. All three can help us love.

        Science and religion both require curiosity. Curiosity is a gift. It does not kill cats.

Passion

Love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, and faithful involvement.

“Passion” is the fourth component of the operational definition of love that I have been promoting. Fr. John Joe Lakers, who gave me these thoughts, argued that passion should come first in the list.

It took me a long time to get past thinking that the word “passion” means romantic love. But romantic love is just one kind of love.

Romantic love is beautiful but temporary. It is usually followed by disillusionment, and it cannot keep a relationship alive for the long haul. The word “passion” can point to a much deeper and longer lasting form of love.

Dorothy Day began what she called a “house of hospitality” in New York City in the 1930’s. She deliberately chose to locate it in a slum area of the city, an area characterized by homeless people, drugs, and crime. Her basic rule was to welcome anybody into the house, let them eat there and stay as long as they needed to. When she quoted the Russian novelist Dostoyevski, “Love is a harsh and dreadful thing,” she was surely thinking of what it costs to live so vulnerable to suffering people. But her way of living was a fruitful form of love. Today there are over 180 “Catholic Worker” houses around the world, all following the pattern she set in New York City. Her vision had staying power.

But passion is not limited to such a dramatic way of life. Passion is what causes people to practice a musical instrument many hours a day for years on end. Passion is why people welcome a severely disabled infant into their family and create a life of love around the child.

Passion is a gift. We do not buy it or manufacture it or control it. Passion is “passive.” We get passion from other people. I would say we get it from God, through other people.

We choose to be respectful, vulnerable, and faithful in our involvement with others. We do not choose passion. Something or someone else gives it to us.

Because love requires passion, love, then, is a gift. 

 

[published in Muddy River News, 4/12/2026]

 

Vulnerability

           The third part of an operational definition of love is vulnerability. Vulnerability is when you do not have control.  

John Joe Lakers, who gave me many of these ideas, tells the story of a couple he had been helping to prepare for marriage.

Laura and Mark were meeting with JJ in his office. Mark had been set to graduate from QU in the spring, but Laura was going to have to return to QU for another year. Mark was in turmoil; he had not yet heard from the graduate schools to which he had applied, and he was afraid that Laura might fall in love with someone else during the year they planned to be apart. As the two of them talked with JJ about the future, Mark suddenly broke down and cried in Laura’s arms.

 

At that moment, Laura knew that she wanted to spend her life with him.

 

Later, Laura and Mark were re-living the event with JJ. As Laura described her experience,  tears of joy came to her eyes. His breaking down had showed her the depth of his love for her. Mark’s memory of the event was different. He said: “I never felt so unlovable in my life, and I was determined that it would never happen again.”

 

JJ’s comment: If both Laura and Mark had not been together physically at the moment when they recalled the experience of his breaking down, both of them could have gone through life without ever knowing how different their experience of the event was. Mark would never have known how wrong he was when he determined never to let something like that happen again.

 

Men are supposed to be in control, not to show vulnerability.

 

Our society fears vulnerability. We need security. But if we let security take over our ability to be vulnerable to the people we love, we imprison ourselves.

 

The First Letter of John says “Perfect love drives out fear.” To love is to go ahead even when you know you might get hurt. You ignore the fear when you decide to love.

 

Three of the four elements of an operational definition of love are respect, faithfulness, and vulnerability. Those three are under our control. The fourth one, passion or emotion, requires special treatment because passion or emotion is not under our control. We decide to be respectful, faithful, or vulnerable. The Marriage Encounter slogan was “Love is a decision, not a feeling.” We cannot decide to be emotional. We can control what we do when we experience emotions, but we cannot control the emotions themselves. They just happen.

 

published in Muddy River News, March 14, 2026

 

 

 

Mater et Magistra

 

Mater et magistra. “Mother and teacher.”

“Mater, si, magistra, non.” That is how William F. Buckley responded to Pope John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical, Mater et magistra: “Mother, yes; teacher, no.”

In 1961 Mr. Buckley’s clever response to the pope was heresy to most Catholics. That was because he, and most Catholics with him, had a too restrictive view of what a teacher is.

Jesus once said that he alone is the teacher, all the rest of us are learners. A good teacher learns from students—teaching is not a one-way street. That is the principle that Pope Francis tried to get us to accept in his effort to promote “synodality,” which is intended to help church teachers learn from the rest of the church. That was as true of the pope himself as it is of the rest of us.

At least since the 1940’s, when Pope Pius XII began to grapple with new questions arising from scientific knowledge of the human body, the official teaching agents of Catholicism, the “magisterium,” have seemed to feel responsible for issuing definitive statements about the morality of every new scientific advancement. What has happened is that Catholic moral teaching has become less and less persuasive to our fellow seekers of truth, inside and outside of the church boundaries. There is a host of questions where public moral sensitivity has moved away from what the magisterium says ought to be done. 

We believers need to enter into honest dialog with everyone else about such questions. We are all learners.

Twenty-five years ago a Catholic personal friend of mine, Mary Lyndon Shanley, published a book titled Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same-sex and Unwed Parents. I was impressed by her approach to the moral issues raised by the list of topics in the subtitle of her book. Our Catholic magisterium has a long list of official statements about all of these issues, but as far as I can tell, few people, and few Catholics, are guided by what the magisterium has said. That leaves faithful Catholics with the choice of being counter-cultural and obeying what the church officially says, or abandoning the official teaching and floating free in an atmosphere without moral guidance.

The same dilemma is at the root of serious political divisions in our country. Because our faith leaders have not engaged in serious dialog with others who do not share our beliefs, one whole segment of the Catholic population has voted for a political party that has abandoned programs designed to alleviate hunger and disease in poorer nations. The Democratic party has used the politics of U.S. Catholic leaders as a reason to banish anyone who considers abortion a moral evil from the party. We are in the middle of a religious war once again, forgetting the past two centuries of peace that arose from the First Amendment of our Constitution and that were re-affirmed by the Second Vatican Council in its decree “On the Dignity of the Human Person,” Dignitatis Humanae.

Catholic moral thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, grappled with the wider culture surrounding the faith community. Thomas was condemned by the University of Paris because he used Aristotle, whose writings had been preserved from destruction by Muslim scholars.  Surely Pope Leo XIII had that in mind when he wrote in 1879 that Catholics should use Aquinas as a guide for their thinking.

Bigger than us

Bigger than us

 

“Bigger than us” I say.

As I reflect on the place religion might play in this messy world, where so many people do not seem to have any need to see and respond to God, I ask myself, what is the core of religious response?

My answer: a sense that there is something bigger than us.

Something, maybe someone, bigger than us. Not just bigger than me, bigger than all of us.

Who are us?

 Back in the ancient days of sociology, the 1950s, one of the more famous sociologists, Robert K. Merton, coined the term “reference group.” He suggested that we fashion in our minds a group of people with whom we identify. We may not belong to that group, and may have no physical connection with them, but they shape who we are.

One of my reference groups is the Roman Catholic church community. That community, in the very concrete form of St. James parish in Decatur, Illinois, saved my parents from the effects of what I believe were my two alcoholic grandfathers, one of whom committed suicide. My parents were lower class—neither went to high school. They were suddenly uprooted from their families in Springfield and sent to Decatur by the Bell Telephone Company. There the church community, and especially its leader, Fr. Francis Ostendorf, rescued them.

The Catholic community is world-wide. It inspired my brother to live for nine years as a missionary on the Brazilian Amazon, which led me to choose “Latin American social and economic development” as one of the two topics I studied intensively for my degree in sociology. My black seminary classmate, Fr. Bennet Spivey, who died two years after his ordination of Lou Gehrig’s disease, motivated me to identify with Black Catholics.

So for me, “us” is worldwide. And now that my church has expanded its sense of who can experience the voice of God, “us” for me is even wider than the Roman Catholic world.

So I say, when Jesus said “make disciples of all nations,” I say: the word “disciple” means “learner.” Jesus calls me to make learners of all nations, and then, maybe when some learners want to affiliate in a deeper way with my church, we can baptize them. Too often in history we baptized first and then made learners. Usually we never got around to the learning and let the baptism (or lack of it) become an excuse for exploitation. “If we baptize you, you can work for us without pay. If you refuse baptism, we kill you.”

 

The troubles of our time

Our greatest problem as we muddle our way through the environmental mess and the worldwide migrations our behavior is causing, is that too many of us are drifting in a world where there is nothing bigger than us. We are masters of our destiny, and our technology should be able to dig us out of whatever hole we dig ourselves into. Without anything bigger than us, self-interest tells us that restraints are not needed.

The regulators do not regulate because there is no sense that there is something bigger than themselves. Why be concerned about the feelings pf co-workers, or respectful of people who look different?

 

Love

My friends kid me about my fascination with definitions. But I insist that we need a working definition of love. Otherwise the word can mean anything, even murder. My working definition of love: respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement of people with each other. (And, if you are a believer, with God).

Why should I respect, be vulnerable to, and be faithful to someone if there is nothing bigger than us?

But there is something bigger than us. That something, who I believe is a someone, is God.

I believe that we should be respectful, vulnerable, and faithful in our dealings with one another because that is how God is involved with us.

God loves, which is the message that Jesus took from his Jewish background, especially the psalms, and lived out himself.