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Catholic Moral Obligations When Voting: Basics on the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church

Associate Pastor's Column
Sunday, November 5, 2006

“As far as possible, citizens should take an active part in public life” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, or CCC, paragraph 1915). This is the teaching of the Church, and, like all her teachings, it is a teaching that saves and enables one to love God above all things and his neighbor as himself.

Once again, we Catholics who live in America, who know our true homeland is heaven, find ourselves before the prospects of governing our nation by electing officers and those who will represent us. What a powerful way to do what the Catechism asks of us.

There is always a lot of energy and debate within Catholic circles whenever the elections draw near. Rarely do these debates make any reference to what the Catholic Church teaches regarding a Catholic’s participation in public life. For today, therefore, would like to offer a few key points for our prayer and thought on this very important topic.

The whole social doctrine of the Catholic Church never looses sight of something called the “common good.” What does the expression common good mean? “By common good is to be understood ‘the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily… It consists of three essential elements:… (1) respect for the person as such… (2) the social well-being and development of the group itself… (3) peace, that is, the stability and security of a just order.” (CCC 1906-9) As a side, I think it’s strikingly beautiful that the Church does not define peace as simply a lack of war: an important point.

By participating in the political community, which is not the only but certainly one of the most complete venues where the common good is realized. Given this, it is necessary and obligatory for us all to cultivate it, excuses notwithstanding. “It is necessary that all participate, each according to his position and role, in promoting the common good. This obligation is inherent in the dignity of the human person” (CCC 1913).

When society provides the conditions necessary for associations or individuals to obtain what is due to them, including the participation in the common good, we call that “social justice.” Social justice in the Catholic Church is not what some would like it to be, for example, those Marxists who cover over their materialist and atheistic communism with a veneer of Catholic words and name their new invention, “Liberation Theology.” There are many other similar distortions to “social justice,” perpetrated by those who are always ready and willing to invent their own version of what Church teaching actually is.

I wish now to apply these principles (the common good, participation, and social justice) to the standard American Catholic who goes to vote. And I wish to do so in the light of three statements from the Catholic Church regarding life, all found in the beautiful encyclical, The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae). “The direct and voluntary taking of all innocent human life” is “always gravely immoral” (EV 57). “Direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder” (EV 62). Euthanasia, “an act or omission which of itself and by intention causes death with the purpose of eliminating all suffering,” is “a grave violation of the law of God” (EV 65).

Of these three statements we see the Church’s position on life very clearly. Abortion annihilates the common good for it does not respect but violate the person; it excludes and makes impossible the well-being and development of any group; and it is not peaceful but extremely violent and disordered. Yet procuring the common good is inherent in the dignity of the human person. And it is an institution which does not obtain what is due for the victims (the baby, but also mother and father and others), but deprives all those things which are due to the baby, and deprives many other goods to countless other people.

All of this demonstrates irrefutably that it is a grave evil to vote pro-abortion. If the day comes when our political community is murdering more than an average of 4,000 Americans a day through a different venue other than abortion, then a Catholic might be permitted to vote the lesser of evils, but even then other moral factors would enter into play, which I have not the space in this article to discuss. But abortion is always and intrinsically evil.

When you vote, take your conscience with you, and not just any conscience, rather, a well educated conscience.

Picture: Jesus and John truly lived in the wombs of their holy mothers. Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494), The Visitation (1491), Musée du Louvre, Paris.