Thank you for hosting a wonderful, lovely, Eucharistic Congress, and for just generally being a fantastic Archdiocese. Since your humble Blog Goliard has not had the occasion to offer such praise in this space before, let that be said at the outset.

Now that it has been said, yours truly has a bone to pick with you.

One of the Archdiocese’s official Twitter updates today reads as follows:

We are relieved to learn a federal judge has temporarily blocked parts of GA’s HB87. Vote 4 comprehensive Immigration! http://t.co/GHA8BTs

This pushes several of your humble Blog Goliard’s buttons.

So it’s now official Catholic teaching that governments may not enforce immigration laws, and that violating those laws must not be investigated and prosecuted?

And it’s the official position of the Archdiocese that the principles of subsidiarity and democratic governance can be thrown out the window, so long as the unelected lawyers in Federal robes are voiding only those legitimately enacted laws of our state government that we personally dislike?

“Social justice” is not the exclusive property of the open-borders crowd, and is not synonymous with “what liberal Democrats believe” (however much it may have been made to appear otherwise over the past forty-plus years). Catholics may legitimately disagree on many political issues, even when the peace and justice crowd would very much prefer to pretend otherwise. Issues—for instance—such as whom we should allow to enter the United States, and what to do about those already illegally here.

Neither the legal nor the political aspects of this dispute are within the Archdiocese’s areas of competence or authority. The Archdiocese should stick to those things that are.