Posted on 08/13/2016 8:43:50 PM PDT by Arthur McGowan
My column this week is a collection of personal comments. Read it as thoughts from a brother in the faith, not as teachings from an archbishop.
Presidential campaigns typically hit full stride after Labor Day in an election year. But 2016 is a year in which two prominent Catholics – a sitting vice president, and the next vice presidential nominee of his party — both seem to publicly ignore or invent the content of their Catholic faith as they go along. And meanwhile, both candidates for the nation’s top residence, the White House, have astonishing flaws.
This is depressing and liberating at the same time. Depressing, because it’s proof of how polarized the nation has become. Liberating, because for the honest voter, it’s much easier this year to ignore the routine tribal loyalty chants of both the Democratic and Republican camps. I’ve been a registered independent for a long time and never more happily so than in this election season. Both major candidates are – what’s the right word? so problematic – that NEITHER IS CLEARLY BETTER THAN THE OTHER. [Emphasis added.]
As Forbes magazine pointed out some months ago, the Republican candidate is worth roughly $4.5 billion. The Democratic candidate is worth roughly $45 million. Compare that with the average American household, which is worth about $144,000. The median U.S. income is about $56,000. Neither major candidate lives anywhere near the solar system where most Americans live, work and raise families. Nonetheless, we’re asked to trust them.
That’s a big ask. One candidate — in the view of a lot of people — is an eccentric businessman of defective ethics whose bombast and buffoonery make him inconceivable as president. And the other – in the view of a lot of people – should be under criminal indictment. The fact that she’s not – again, in the view of a lot of people — proves Orwell’s Animal Farm principle that “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
So what are we to do this election cycle as Catholic voters? Note that by “Catholic,” I mean people who take their faith seriously; people who actually believe what the Catholic faith holds to be true; people who place it first in their loyalty, thoughts and actions; people who submit their lives to Jesus Christ, to Scripture and to the guidance of the community of belief we know as the Church.
Anyone else who claims the Catholic label is simply fooling himself or herself — and even more importantly, misleading others.
The American bishops offer valuable counsel in their document Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship (available from the USCCB), and this year especially, they ask us to pray before we vote. This is hardly new “news.” Prayer is always important. In a year when each Catholic voter must choose between deeply flawed options, prayer is essential. And prayer involves more than mumbling a Hail Mary before we pull the voting booth lever for someone we see as the lesser of two evils. Prayer is a conversation, an engagement of the soul with God. It involves listening for God’s voice and educating our consciences.
It’s absurd – in fact, it’s blasphemous – to assume that God prefers any political party in any election year. But God, by his nature, is always concerned with good and evil and the choices we make between the two. For Catholics, no political or social issue stands in isolation. But neither are all pressing issues equal in foundational importance or gravity. The right to life undergirds all other rights and all genuine social progress. It cannot be set aside or contextualized in the name of other “rights” or priorities without prostituting the whole idea of human dignity.
God created us with good brains. It follows that he will hold us accountable to think deeply and clearly, rightly ordering the factors that guide us, before we act politically. And yet modern American life, from its pervasive social media that too often resemble a mobocracy, to the relentless catechesis of consumption on our TVs, seems designed to do the opposite. It seems bent on turning us into opinionated and distracted cattle unable to gain mastery over our own appetites and thoughts. Thinking and praying require silence, and the only way we can get silence is by deciding to step back and unplug.
This year, a lot of good people will skip voting for president but vote for the “down ticket” names on their party’s ballot; or vote for a third party presidential candidate; or not vote at all; or find some mysterious calculus that will allow them to vote for one or the other of the major candidates. I don’t yet know which course I’ll personally choose. It’s a matter properly reserved for every citizen’s informed conscience.
But I do know a few of the things I’ll be reading between now and November. The list is not exclusive or comprehensive. But this year these particular titles seem especially urgent:
Living the Gospel of Life. This 1998 pastoral letter of the U.S. bishops remains the best brief guide to American Catholic political reflection yet produced. Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society by R.R. Reno (Regnery) and It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies by Mary Eberstadt (HarperCollins). Both of these books are new, important, a key to understanding the current moment in our national life, and deeply engaging. They need to be discussed and shared widely.
And finally two essays by the late, great Czech writer, Václav Havel, “Politics and Conscience” and “The Power of the Powerless.” Both are collected in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990 (Vintage Books). Havel was not (to my knowledge) a religious believer, and he wrote as a dissident during an era of Soviet Bloc repression. But his commitment to what he called “living in the truth,” and his understanding and critique of the weaknesses in Western societies like our own – not just Marxist ones – were remarkable. They remain relevant right now, today.
The next few months will determine the next decade and more of our nation’s life. We need to be awake, we need to clear our heads of media noise, and we need to think quietly and carefully before we vote. None of us can afford to live the coming weeks on autopilot.
As a faithful, practicing Catholic this is maddening beyond words. It’s an outrage. Hillary Clinton supports and promotes almost everything that is antithetical to the Christian faith and culture, including consummate greed, infanticide, gay marriage, transgenderism, etc.
Trump? He wants to enforce laws on the books to protect Americans and use American law to protect the American people from obvious threats from peoples hostile to Western Christian society.
To me, one side is demonic while the other side is simpatico with Christian culture.
Yes. He is Native American.
He also writes in a weasely style. Notice how often he hides behind what “a lot of people” think? Notice how totally abstract his comments about pro-abortion katholyk politicians are?
Has Chaput gone lefty? I thought he would at a minimum support the more pro-life candidate.
IMHo, we're almost as bad off as during the Arian heresy days.
It’s not just the Catholic church. I’m seeing the same mentality in the Lutheran Church, mostly from former Cruz supporters.
He is caught in a web. He knows better, I think. But he doesn’t dare name any candidate, and he doesn’t dare destroy his respectability at the bishops’ conference (like Bruskewitz and Burke, who are non-persons), but he wants to be accepted among a certain kind of “conservative”—the First Things and CRISIS crowd.
He also has to know that the wrath of Bergoglio will come down on him if he sounds too much like Burke. Bergoglio likes bishops like Cupich, who is overtly pro-Democrat and overtly pro-abortion. (According to Cupich, getting aborted is no worse than being unemployed or “undocumented.”)
There is some strong “pro-life” language in this article, but he NULLIFIES EVERY BIT OF IT by DENIGRATING all people who might vote for Trump. He characterizes ALL Trump voters as people who use “some strange calculus.”
Proving that there are millions of people whose “spiritual” discernment is no deeper than following any greasy fraud who waves a Bible in the air.
Ah, what the heck. Kill the babies, take down the borders.
Amen.
Geez next he is going to say God is not a football fan...
Vote Amalekite! How sad, to find church leaders going all GOPe - right when muscular Christianity's never been more needed.
It’s blasphemous to say that God prefers the party that is against butchering babies?
This is the drooling imbecility that Catholics have come to expect from their bishops.
It’s blasphemous to say that God prefers the party that is against butchering babies?
This is the drooling imbecility that Catholics have come to expect from their bishops.
Now you’re thinking like the Catholic bidhops!
Although I agree with your sentiments on abortion I really don’t think God is a partisan or a football fan.
He gave man free will and a conscious, its up to each individual to make his own way. God shows the way but he doesn’t pick sides otherwise the concept of free will would be meaningless in my opinion...
I tried to leave a comment but the website wouldn’t let me. Here’s what I attempted to post:
So disappointed to hear you say both candidates are equally flawed. Hillary is a corrupt liar who has been in politics for over 40 years. She’s part of the elite cabal that wants complete dominion over all of us. Worst of all, she’s rabidly pro-choice, which is antithetical to Church teaching. Trump, on the other hand, is pro-life. Since you claim in your essay that respect for life is the #1 issue Catholics should consider, the choice is clear. Trump 2016.
So God was equally pleased by Hitler’s building of the death camps as He was by those who strove to save Jews from going to them? God is equally pleased by those who saw the heads off Christians in the Middle East as he is by those who try to stop them?
That’s what you are saying when you say God is “non-partisan.”
If you don’t think God prefers a party that is against tearing babies into pieces to a party that calls tearing babies to pieces a “right,” then I daresay you don’t know much about God.
“then I daresay you don’t know much about God.”
I daresay that observation has been made about you. I guess I’m in good company...
What anybody has said about me is irrelevant.
So, you are sticking with your position that God is equally pleased by gassing Jews and saving Jews? By the Democrats’ support for abortion and the Republicans’ opposition to abortion?
I did not say anything about God being equally pleased about anything. Those are your words not mine.
I am sticking to my position that God is not a partisan, he does not prefer nor interfere in the political squabbles of mankind.
God’s word is clear on the subject of abortion as are the teachings of the Catholic Church. As I stated God’s position is clear. But he is not going to push those with free will one way or another.
It’s similar to the argument as to why a benevolent Lord would allow all the evil in the world and my answer has always been that the evil in the world goes with free will. On this earth evil is an unavoidable trade off for the gift of free will...
Not in my Bible.
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