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)