Christian Morality Is About Individuals, Not Groups

 St. Thomas Aquinas has provided us with the best definition of love.

You've got a decent chance of figuring out what "the good" is for an individual if you really get to know them. At least you can make an educated guess. You can also take steps to make sure your actions don't have destructive secondary effects on others.

You've got just about no chance at all of figuring out what "the good" is for the members of a large group and you can just forget about predicting how you might harm people outside the group.

I've discussed in the past how my middle brother died as a homeless addict and alcoholic. If you had exerted yourself to do "good" for him, you would have locked him away in rehab for the rest of his life and given him some vigorous home truths. I have no idea if such an action would be best for any particular homeless person, I just know it's what he needed.

When the progressive prelates in the Catholic Church talk about "uplifting the marginalized," warehousing the homeless like that is not what they mean. As a result, "uplifting the marginalized" would have been counterproductive for my brother.

If Bishop Pham of San Diego goes out to the tomato fields in Central California and gets to know Jose Hernandez, illegal immigrant, he's got a really good shot at helping poor old Jose without kicking the rest of America in the groin. It's a bit murkier when Bishop Pham and the rest of our moral-pornography-besotted bishops talk about the "migrants" as a group, insisting that we deport none of them.

I recently saw some eye-opening education stats from California. Over 70% of black 4th graders in California are not proficient at reading at the basic level. The basic level. Dittos for black 8th graders. That means "See spot run" is about as far as they can get. They can barely communicate in English, there's zero chance they can communicate at all in Spanish.

Thanks to Bishop Pham and his buddies in the Church, the language of construction, housekeeping and landscape maintenance in California is now Spanish. Those functionally illiterate black kids are shut out from the only careers available to provide them productive, successful lives.

Had our bishop focused on Jose, he'd have been fine and we'd all have applauded. Maybe Jose has a wife and children and he's trying to keep the family together while his wife undergoes complicated treatments for her painful dandruff condition. The bishop would have been able to predict the ripple effects from his actions with a degree of accuracy.

When the bishops lecture us about the migrants, they clearly have no idea what they're talking about. They aren't trying to hurt people on purpose, but they've still managed to absolutely stomp all over young blacks' employment prospects. Even now, they have no clue at all what they're doing to the rest of us.

That's not a criticism of their intentions or intellect, it's a consequence of their decision to take Jesus' teachings and extend them from individuals to groups, which is something He never did for reasons that have become all too obvious.

So help Jose and let the polity take care of the migrants.