I was glad to see that the President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops included the need to reduce “unsustainable deficits” in his offer to help congressional leaders avert a government shutdown. Phil Lawler had emphasized this very problem last Thursday in The debt limit as a moral test, though he also noticed that limiting governmental debt has seldom been an episcopal priority. Nonetheless, one wonders why the Conference should have a specific political agenda at all, or why it should offer its own political brilliance to avert a government shutdown…