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Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas, delivered the Steele Lecture in Houston last week and he has now posted the text on his blog. (h/t to Rocco for the link.) Bishop Flores looks at both the HHS mandate and the attempts by several states to limit the Church's ability to serve immigrants, and notes the varied, partisan responses this has caused. I think +Flores is a bit too sunny about the American founding, reading back into their minds some ideas about what we would come to call subsidiarity in the late nineteenth century. The American founders were also deeply hostile to Catholic understandings of such key words as "freedom" and "conscience." Still, +Flores demonstrates a deft and deep thoughtfulness in this lecture, and shows why he is rightly considered one of the rising stars of the US episcopate. For me, the money quote is this:
