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.