random thoughts on a Tuesday evening

• Archbishop Wuerl has written his first pastoral letter on confession. Some people are cheering but it seems tragic to me that the church in America has fallen so low that people are impressed because a bishop tells people to go to confession during Lent. Didn't that used to be a no-brainer?
  
  
• On Amy Welborn's and Mark Shea's blog there is an conversation going on about immigration and comments that Karl Rove supposedly made. I think condemning his alleged comments are hasty and hypocritical. Hasty because we don't really know that he said this. Reporters have been known to lie before. Jayson Blair did it at the New York Times and Janet Cooke did it at the Washington Post.
  
  And it's hypocritical because let's face it : Many Middle and upper class Americans don't like manual labor and would prefer to have someone else do what they consider to be a lowly, nasty job.. When was the last time, outside of the Southa small MidWestern town that you saw a white or black kid bussing tables in a restaurant? When was the last time a middle class white kid knocked on your door and asked if he could cut your grass? Rather than paint our own living rooms a lot of couples are choosing the degrading and potentially dangerous practice of picking men up at the day labor lot next to Home Depot or Lowes and dropping them off on the side of the road when the job is done.