“Nobody tells me how to vote!”
That sentiment has been expressed repeatedly lately in response to statements made by Catholic bishops on faithful citizenship and respect for life, and most vociferously by a recent TLIC letter-writer demeaning the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus for urging opposition to pro-abortion political candidates.
And yet in almost no case is the above statement true. On Nov. 4, virtually all of us who go to the polls will cast our votes for political candidates and parties who have spent months not just telling us how to vote, but haranguing us day and night through their speeches, sound bites and advertisements, to vote for them. Labor unions, business associations, civic and taxpayer groups and other special interests also weigh in, urging our vote for specific candidates — usually in service to our own self-interest. Yet it is somehow deemed unacceptable for the leading Catholic lay organization in the world to exhort us to move beyond self-interest by using our votes to defend our most defenseless brothers and sisters who are being legally put to death by the thousands every day in America’s shameful culture of abortion.
Neither the Knights nor our bishops have urged a vote for any specific candidate or party. What they have done, and continue to do, is remind us of our responsibility as Catholics to cast our votes not out of self-interest, but on behalf of the common good.
Our state’s Catholic bishops this week (page 21) urge us to examine a wide range of issues through “the lens of our faith,” and then to exercise our best prudential judgments in determining which policy approaches, and thereby which candidates and parties, merit our support.
They also, however, remind us that “the right to life is the right through which all others flow,” and that therefore “the inalienable right to life of every innocent human person outweighs other concerns where Catholics may use prudential judgment, such as how best to meet the needs of the poor, or to increase access to health care for all.”
If a candidate were an avowed racist, it is doubtful that most of us would look beyond that to examine his views on health care, or school choice, or the war in Iraq. His support for such an intrinsic evil would disqualify him from our support.
Likewise, as Bridgeport Bishop William Lori told us last week, “A conscientious voter must question what grave moral issue rises to the level of nearly 49 million lives lost to the evil of abortion.”
Some see this as politically partisan, since one major national party seems considerably more open — though not universally so — to defending the right to life of pre-born children than does the other. But the bishops’ pro-life advocacy well pre-dates this crystallizing of party positions on abortion. It is intended not to favor one party over the other, but to persuade both parties, and all candidates, to uphold this most fundamental of human rights, without which no other rights are possible.
That is also what the Knights of Columbus are doing, in their ad campaign urging us to “vote pro-life.” Anyone is free to disagree with their message, or with the moral teachings of our Catholic bishops, and to vote accordingly. But we should welcome, not resent, their efforts to contribute a nonpartisan, moral perspective to our political debate.
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