I read it. My brother who lives on the Missouri side, is a yellow dog democrat prolife Catholic. I know. Difficult to understand. But assuming he reads this joint pastoral letter, he and his wife will cling to this phrase from Benedict: “When a Cathlic does not share a candidate’s stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remove material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presense of proportionate reasons.” To the extent I understand that sentence at all, I know that my brother believes that Republicans are so evil that this alone is sufficient reason to vote against them no matter what the policy of the democrat is re: abortion or anything else.
"remote material cooperation" -- doing something that is not evil in itself, but is twisted or misused by someone else to serve evil, outside of your control.
"the presence of proportionate reasons" -- In other words, you could vote for a pro-abort candidate if the other candidate is correspondingly worse.
But the "worse" has to be proportionately and correspondingly worse than permitting, excusing, and in some cases enabling the deliberate murder of 4,000 innocent kids a day.
What would your brother say Republicans would do that would be proportionately worse than that? "Republicans are evil" doesn't cut it. They have to be indisputably more evil than supporting 4000 murders a day.
It's worth a shot.