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Entry: Benedict on the Border--A Showdown over Church and Nation-State Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/benedict_on_the_border_a_showdown_of_church_and_nation_state#24866 Post contents: To the list of papal decisions that tests one's patriotism, one can add papal opposition to Magna Carta. To get closer to the heart of your article: It is not clear that the excerpt from the Catechism that you quote adequately balances compassion for emigrants with the common good. The Catechism does not say that the nation-state can put a limit on immigration, which it declares is a "natural right" for the poor; the only thing the nation-state can do is make it subject to "juridical conditions." The rest of the statement somewhat clarifies what this means: immigrants have to respect the civics, culture and presumably religion of the new country. That is a far cry from excluding immigrants from certain cultural, national or religious backgrounds for the sake of preserving the continuity of the host country's traditions. It is not even clear that a nation-state could limit immigration on economic grounds, such as maintaining wage rates. I do strongly disagree with Mr. Zmirak's assertion that the "Westphalian" doctrine of national state sovereignty implies that the state could "own" the individual "body and soul." The Netherlands and the United States, when they first began existence as independent political entities, were limited governments that respected individual liberties while zealously asserting national sovereignty. National state sovereignty means that there is no institution that exercises a temporal, juridical, political or quasi-political authority over he nation-state. Non-governmental organizations and the papacy can issue moral judgements, but they cannot issue decrees revoking the legitimacy of the nation-state. This is an eminently sensible arrangement. If any person or organization has the power to make a legal decision on the authority of a state, then that person or organization becomes a de facto state authority. We cannot maintain our individual liberties if the collective liberty of our national communities can be controlled by supra-national agencies, such as the UN or the EU--or the papacy, which used to claim authority over temporal power making the pope a quasi-emperor. Sent at: 2008 07 24