At Millennial, an interview with Eric LeCompte, the executive director of JubileeUSA, on building the kind of economy the Holy Father, and Catholic Social Doctrine more generally, calls for.
At America magazine, J. Kevin Appleby writes on the need for all Catholics in the U.S. to oppose the mass deportations of immigrants beginning in our midst.
In the New York Times, Ross Douthat does what he always does: Some fine insights set amidst gross simplifications of American religious history and Catholic doctrine.
For example, this paragraph misunderstands the complexity of Dignitatis humanae's drafting and text:
So Leo's letter began a long (and complicated) process of harmonization between America and Rome, sealed in the 1960s at the Second Vatican Council, in which the church's political thought was tacitly Americanized. No more would the Vatican emphasize the necessity, for Catholics, of supporting an "integralist" relationship between their government and church. Instead the American way of doing religious politics — in which a secular political framework allowed a great deal of room for religiously inspired activism — was blessed and accepted as the Catholic way as well.
Question for Ross: Would Congar have agreed with that last sentence?
Lastly, Fr. John Zuhlsdorf has been speculating about how I would respond to his gift of a "combat rosary" to me. It arrived Tuesday. I do not have Father's mailing address so I shall communicate to him here:
Dear Fr. Zuhlsdorf,
Thank you for the gift of a rosary. I pray the rosary using one my dear beloved grandmother of happy memory gave me, and she was combative enough for the three of us.
Kind regards,
Michael Sean Winters
