Pope Francis Questions Whether Trump Is A Viable Candidate For Catholic Voters

This makes developing a serious immigration policy a serious life issue to ponder for American Catholic voters. We have always lived in a complex world where political issues cannot be separated out easily. In the most cited academic book of our generation, We Have Never Been Modern, Catholic philosopher Bruno Latour points out that the temptation to separate issues out from their natural connections to other issues is a typically modernist temptation:

Headings like Economy, Politics, Science, Books, Culture, Religion and Local Events remain in place [as remnants of modernist thinking] as if there were nothing odd going on… Press the most innocent aerosol button and you’ll be heading for the Antarctic, and from there to the University of California at Irvine, the mountain ranges of Lyon, the chemistry of inert gases, and then maybe to the United Nations, but this fragile thread will be broken into as many segments as there are pure disciplines. By all means, they seem to say, let us not mix up knowledge, interest, justice and power. Let us not mix up heaven and earth, the global stage and the local scene, the human and the nonhuman. ‘But these imbroglios do the mixing,’ you’ll say, ‘they weave our world together!’ ‘Act as if they didn’t exist,’ the analysts reply. They have cut the Gordian knot with a well-honed sword. The shaft is broken: on the left, they have put knowledge of things; on the right, power and human politics.

Separating out of issues has always been a typically fiction, but reality is much more complex. I’d only add that the recently deceased Rene Girard’s philosophy is one possible resource for putting all that the the modern fiction would separate back together.

If Catholics want to promote a true ethic of life that will increase the world’s population, then they will have to figure out an equitable policies of wealth distribution and dealing with immigration. There is no getting around this with superficial walls of separation. The world does not lack the financial resources or land to house more people, but it does have a problem in distributing wealth and property.

As the Catechism teaches: “The universal destination of goods remains primordial, even if the promotion of the common good requires respect for the right to private property and its exercise.”

UPDATE: Trump is toying with the idea of suing the pope.

Even hippies like John Lennon knew we can afford to solve these problems humanely: