Lansing Update:
Forming a Catholic Conscience Before Voting
Posted October 25, 2024
A Catholic Approach to Voting: Forming a Catholic Conscience
With the election quickly approaching, Michigan Catholic Conference continues its voter education efforts to urge the faithful to vote with a conscience informed by the truths of Church teaching. To further advance this message, MCC will take the next four weeks before the election to republish its election edition of Focus in four installments. The following is part three.
For faith to inform one’s participation in civic life, forming a Catholic conscience becomes an important and helpful first step.
Conscience, as explained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is the point of judgment where a person recognizes the moral quality of a particular act. Formed according to God’s revelation and the teachings of the Church, conscience helps a person discern how to act in accordance with the truth.
Rather than a mere feeling, or a green light to justify doing anything a person wants, conscience can be thought of as the voice of God within that invites a person to do good, to act justly, and to treat others with dignity and respect. Doing the right thing—particularly in tough situations—is a process that starts with internal listening, continues in prayer, and ends with rejecting an evil or a harmful outcome.
A Catholic conscience, formed according to God’s revelation and the teachings of the Church, helps individuals act according to the truth.
A Catholic conscience is best formed through prayer and regular reception of the sacraments, along with reading Scripture and the spiritual and teaching resources handed down by the Church. It is important to recognize certain acts are incompatible with love of God and neighbor and are always opposed to the authentic good of persons. These acts, called intrinsic evils, should always be rejected.
It is essential for Catholics to be guided by a well-formed conscience that recognizes that all issues do not carry the same moral weight and that the moral obligation to oppose policies promoting intrinsically evil acts has a special claim on our consciences and our actions.
A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who favors a policy promoting an intrinsically evil act, such as abortion, euthanasia, racist behavior, assisted suicide, deliberately subjecting workers or the poor to subhuman living conditions, or redefining marriage in ways that violate its essential meaning, if the voter’s intent is to support that position.
There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position even on policies promoting an intrinsically evil act may reasonably decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons.
A candidate’s position on a single issue is not sufficient to guarantee a voter’s support. Yet if a candidate’s position on a single issue promotes an intrinsically evil act, such as legal abortion, redefining marriage in a way that denies its essential meaning, or racist behavior, a voter may legitimately disqualify a candidate from receiving support.
These decisions should consider a candidate’s commitments, character, integrity, and ability to influence a given issue. In the end, this is a decision to be made by each Catholic guided by a conscience formed by Catholic moral teaching.
The social teachings proclaimed by the Church offer a refreshing vision of hope, because they are founded in God, who is the infinite source of all goodness and love.
Accepting with prayer the Church’s teachings will challenge longstanding voting habits and even historic loyalty to a particular party. However, a conscience formed by these teachings provides a cohesive and consistent perspective on current issues, where political choices are guided by faith, rather than by partisan stances.
To help summarize the Church’s social tradition, the following nine advocacy principles help illustrate what the Church teaches and are meant to assist in evaluating candidate positions on policy issues.
Upon reflection, Catholic voters should ask themselves if the candidates for whom they are considering voting embody these principles, and if so, how.
Upholding the Dignity of Human Life
The Church proclaims every human person is created in the image and likeness of God and that each person possesses inherent and inviolable human dignity, present from the moment of conception until natural death.
Defending human life from willful destruction is a pre-eminent issue, the bedrock principle for promoting the common good. It means that every person—regardless of his or her stage of life or condition—has a right to life, and to live in a dignified manner through the provision of his or her basic needs.
Because of its special concern for the poor, the Church believes public policies must prioritize those who struggle to make ends meet, preserve the social safety net, and promote affordable housing, childcare, and decent jobs. The rights of workers should be supported, which includes the payment of just wages and the ability to organize and bargain collectively without reprisal.
Protecting Religious Liberty and the Freedom to Serve
Catholics serve others, particularly those in need, by volunteering at and operating soup kitchens, health care facilities, refugee shelters, food pantries, pregnancy centers, and homeless shelters, among other service agencies. Such acts of charity are driven by Jesus’s commandment to ‘love thy neighbor’ and to do so with fidelity to His teachings. Protecting religious liberty—the right to worship and to practice one’s faith freely—means the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment must be maintained and protected in public life.
Parents are the primary educators of their children, and so the Church believes parents have the right to direct their children’s education in accordance with their convictions. This includes the right for parents to send their child to the school of their choice, and for the state to make those choices available to all.
Family built upon marriage is the central institution of social life, thus the Church advocates for policies that support and strengthen both marriage and family life. This includes promoting marriage as the lifelong covenant between one man and one woman, as well as policies that safeguard the rights and welfare of children.
The Church believes affordable and accessible health care is a fundamental human right and must be extended to the poor, uninsured, unemployed, and other vulnerable populations.
To promote restorative justice, the Church supports efforts that include aiding crime victims and their families, assisting people leaving prison as they reintegrate into society, and strengthening relationships between police and the communities they serve.
In recognizing the inherent dignity of migrants and refugees, the Church advocates for an immigration system that ensures humane treatment, protects families, and offers a path to citizenship, while also maintaining the integrity of our nation’s borders and the rule of law.
Caring for Creation and Preserving Natural Resources
The Church promotes responsible stewardship of the environment and the Earth’s natural resources to honor God’s gift of creation. This includes acknowledging and addressing the effects of climate change, with particular emphasis on protecting the people most affected by adverse climate conditions.
