ASPECTS OF THE IMMIGRATION CRISIS

By Father James Thornton

In a portion of a very fine collection of essays by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, published in English fifty years ago under the title Concord and Liberty, we read of the distress of the Roman statesman Cicero at the fact that his country, his beloved Rome, was sunk deeply into crisis — a deadly crisis as it turned out — and that the way of life which all Romans had for centuries taken for granted as part of the established order of the universe was crumbling and would soon be a mere accumulation of memories. Among these memories, of course, were Roman liberty and the famed Roman republican system. Cicero gave expression to the belief that something deeper was at the root of Roman vexations, something that made the crisis through which he was living different from that experienced in earlier upheavals. The very foundations of Roman existence, as they had always been understood, were threatened. As Ortega y Gasset put it, “What [Cicero] beheld was not merely a struggle … within the human setting that from time immemorial had been the Roman commonwealth, but the total destruction of that community.”

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