The Two Usurpations: On Piddington, Proscription, and the Sword That Belongs to Neither.

So we have a village with a real grievance, a private army offering to defend it, and a ministry reaching for its proscription powers. I want to argue that there are two usurpations here and not one, that they are opposite in direction and equal in gravity, and that the Catholic tradition possesses the resources to condemn both without collapsing either into the other. The State has claimed a jurisdiction that does not belong to it. The private band has claimed a sword that does not belong to it. Neither condemnation touches the villagers of Piddington, whose grievance is legitimate, whose only weapon so far has been a ballot of no legal effect, and whose own parish representatives have said plainly that they did not ask for masked men and that their opposition long predated the arrival of Mr Thomas.

Luke 22:36–38 Between the Sword of the Magistrate and the Consent of the Governed - A Coda to The Sword and the Stranger and The State and the Open Door. Conclusion to the Essay Trilogy on “Immigration, the State and Public Consent”.

Popular argument on this question, from both directions, tends to treat the Gospels as though they were a manual of border statute waiting to be applied. They are not, and a piece that pretends otherwise earns nothing but the reader's justified suspicion. But refusing that error is not the same as refusing the question. Scripture, read across its full canon and its subsequent theological elaboration, does make two distinct and authentically weighty claims that bear on the matter of illegal immigration — one concerning the competence of civil authority, the other concerning the personal duty owed to the stranger.