Voting and Salvation

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - February 29, 2008

In a highly provocative op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post, Joe Feuerherd asks whether his vote for Barack Obama in the Maryland Democratic primary may seal his damnation.

A veteran journalistic headliner for the National Catholic Reporter, Feuerherd readily admits he cannot be exculpated by invincible ignorance. "According to the leaders of my church," he acknowledges, "I put my soul at risk. That's right, says the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — tap the touch screen for a pro-abortion-rights candidate and you're probably punching your ticket to hell."

That, of course, is not exactly what the bishops said, but we'll wait for Feuerherd to finish his fulminations before clarifying what our bishops wrote. Feuerherd's criticisms are important insofar as they have been routinely echoed by other Catholics in various venues during the present election cycle.

"The bishops have raised the stakes," Feuerherd asserts. "It's not only lawmakers and candidates who risk damnation, 98 percent of the U.S. bishops agreed last November, but the voters who put them in office. 'It is important to be clear,' the bishops said in a 44-page statement titled 'Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,' 'that the political choices faced by citizens [emphasis added by Feuerherd] not only have an impact on general peace and prosperity but also may affect the individual's salvation.'

"To Catholics like me who oppose liberal abortion laws but also think that other issues — war or peace, health care, just wages, immigration, affordable housing, torture — actually matter, the idea that abortion trumps everything, all the time, no matter what, is both bad religion and bad civics. It's not, for God's sake, as though we're in Nazi Germany and supporting Hitler. Or is it? Amazingly, at least one influential bishop [Bishop Thomas Doran of Rockford, Illinois] has made just that comparison publicly, and it's a good bet that many others believe it privately…

"The bishops' defenders on the liberal/Democratic side of the political spectrum — and there are some — are quick to note that 'Forming Consciences' doesn't limit its condemnation of 'intrinsically evil' acts to the issues of abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage. … The bishops say, for example, that a Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who promotes the 'intrinsic evil' of racism. Fair enough. But when's the last time a credible candidate for any office in the land actually advocated racism? It's a straw man designed to protect the bishops against charges that their political agenda is too narrow.

"As to the death penalty, immigration, the Iraq war, health care and other social justice issues, these fall into the realm of 'prudential judgment' — areas where Catholics of goodwill, say the bishops, can disagree. This, naturally enough, provides convenient cover for Catholic candidates who support the war, think the death penalty should be expanded, would leave millions uninsured and oppose immigration reform…

"So what's a pro-life, pro-family, antiwar, pro-immigrant, pro-economic-justice Catholic like me supposed to do in November?," Feuerherd queries in conclusion. "That's an easy one. True to my faith, I'll vote for the candidate who offers the best hope of ending an unjust war, who promotes human dignity through universal health care and immigration reform, and whose policies strengthen families and provide alternatives to those in desperate situations. Sounds like I'll be voting for the Democrat — and the bishops be damned."

Damning the successors of the apostles in print surely reveals something about the quality of a person's Catholicism. Even if understood rhetorically, it points to the fact that Feuerherd has rejected not just the principles that the American bishops enunciated for the formation of conscience with respect to voting; he has also rejected the bishops themselves and their authority to teach those principles. Whatever the eschatological consequences of voting for a pro-abortion candidate, it's surely not a salutary gamble for a Catholic to place himself in opposition to — and indeed above — the successors of the apostles as a body on an issue of faith and morals.

What did the bishops teach in their "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship"? They said that voting is an important moral choice in which a voter reveals what he or she values most. This means that voting involves not just taste but the truth. Especially today with candidates for the higher office, our choice is seldom between political apples and oranges, but between right and wrong. And as in any important decision between right and wrong, it is a step toward heaven or toward hell, meaning, yes, our salvation depends on it.

To help us to choose morally, God has given us a conscience, but we have the responsibility to form it with the principles of moral truth revealed by God, grasped through the natural law, or taught definitively by the Church. With regard to voting for someone who supports abortion, the bishops give two principles:

First, they teach, "A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism, if the voter's intent is to support that position. In such cases a Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil."

Second, they add, "There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate's unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons. Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons."

The bishops do not specify what these "truly grave moral reasons" for voting for someone with an unacceptable pro-abortion position would be. But we could say that those reasons would have to be so weighty as to persuade, for example, an African-American or a Jew to vote for the same candidate in the same election if the candidate were, respectively, a member of the Ku Klux Klan or a Neo-Nazi.

This analogy may strike someone like Feuerherd as a "strawman" or as hyperbole, but that would indicate only that he really doesn't think that abortion is as evil as it is. For after we strip away the pro-abortion euphemisms and get beyond public opinion polls, those who support abortion promote something at least as execrable as the wishes of KKK members and neo-Nazis. In the final analysis, all three groups seek to dehumanize and destroy members of a race — and pro-abortion supporters, the largest race of all, the "unwanted" members of the human race.

Feuerherd implies that if he were in Nazi Germany, he wouldn't have supported Hitler no matter what Hitler's other positions were. Certain positions are so evil, he seems to acknowledge, as to vitiate a leader's character. But he needs to ask: Was the greater evil in Nazi Germany the virulent and despicable anti-Semitism or the fact that innocent human beings — Jews and other "undesirables" — were being systematically slaughtered by the millions in concentration camps? The abortion clinic is our society's gas chamber, where today's unwanted innocent human beings are being executed by the millions each year. How could a Catholic in good conscience vote for someone who wants the massacre to continue? And how could a Catholic who did so not think his salvation would be in jeopardy?

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.