When the U.S. bishops last November approved new supplementary materials to go along with their “Faithful Citizenship” politics guide, they also reaffirmed the Church’s obligation to defending the unborn, “our most vulnerable and voiceless brothers and sisters,” as a “preeminent priority” for Catholics in political life.
In remarks to reporters, Archbishop William Lori, vice president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, explained that “the protection of the unborn remains a preeminent priority because unborn children who are affected by this are utterly vulnerable, utterly voiceless, and there are so many of them who have died.”
“In our midst, there are people who are vulnerable for many, many different reasons. The reason we focus on the unborn as we do is because they are utterly voiceless and defenseless and abortion is a direct taking of human life,” Lori added.
The bishops did more than approve an introductory letter to their 2007 document on Catholics in public life. They also agreed to make an effort to amend and update the text of “Faithful Citizenship”itself — last updated in 2015 — with a revision process due to begin this November.
But when the Republican Party changed its official platform this week — dropping its explicit objection to abortion, and making an explicit endorsement of in vitro fertilization, the process of revising “Faithful Citizenship” got a lot more complicated for some bishops.
Some bishops will want to continue their political guidance in a business-as-usual manner, with language that some observers say signals implicitly to Catholics that the Republican Party is more aligned with Catholic values.
But other bishops will likely see the platform change as a moment to emphasize that Catholics should push back demonstrably against a bipartisan scheme in which pro-lifers have fewer and fewer allies in federal government.
The complication means it could be quite some time before a revised version of “Faithful Citizenship” comes to pass — and when it does, it may well take a very different tone, and form, than past versions of the text.
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As it’s currently written, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” is a 43 page guide, meant according to its introduction as a “moral framework” for American Catholics, meant to help lay Catholics make “judgments about concrete circumstances,” by “form[ing] their consciences and grow[ing] in the virtue of prudence, to approach the many and varied issues of the day with the mind of Christ.”
The text insists it is not a voting guide, and that it is not the job of bishops to direct Catholics to the candidates for whom they should vote. But the document does give guidance about how to weigh candidates in the voting booth.
“Catholics often face difficult choices about how to vote. This is why it is so important to vote according to a well-formed conscience that perceives the proper relationship among moral goods.”
“A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who favors a policy promoting an intrinsically evil act, such as abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, deliberately subjecting workers or the poor to subhuman living conditions, redefining marriage in ways that violate its essential meaning, or racist behavior, if the voter’s intent is to support that position,” the text says.
“In such cases, a Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil. At the same time, a voter should not use a candidate’s opposition to an intrinsic evil to justify indifference or inattentiveness to other important moral issues involving human life and dignity,” it continues.
“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. Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral evil.”
Critics of the text argue that its framing of the weighing exercise in the voting booth leans too heavily in the direction of the GOP: essentially, that the bishops have set a high bar for the possibility of voting for a pro-abortion politician, because the gravity of abortion is so profound, that there are few other “morally grave issues” in the voting booth with the same level of significance.
Supporters of the text have often argued much the same, with bishops each election cycle teaching directly that it is nearly impossible to find any “morally grave issue” to compare with the scourge of abortion, and thus, that Catholics should discern to vote for the major party candidate with a platform opposing abortion’s legal protection, which, practically speaking, usually means the Republican.
But in either case, most commentators have seen the text as presenting effectively a binary choice for voters — between one candidate or another — with very little attention paid to the prospect of voting for third parties, or abstention in the voting booth.
But the GOP’s shift could change that.
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The bishops planned to revise “Faithful Citizenship” beginning with closed-door discussions this year, at their plenary assembly after the presidential election, in late November.
Most observers expected that the debate among bishops would focus on the political weight given to abortion in guidance about how Catholics should decide between candidates. The debate seemed likely to center around bishops emphasizing the importance of voting for politicians who would restrict legal protection for abortion, and bishops arguing that voting on other issues, like climate change, could justify voting for a pro-choice politician.
That is the trajectory that the debate among bishops has taken in recent years — and any effort to revise “Faithful Citizenship” seemed certain to follow its path.
But the changes to the Republican Party’s platform this week will almost certainly change the equation.
At the direction of the Trump campaign, Republicans dropped their call for federal legislation prohibiting abortion, in favor of an approach that would see abortion regarded as only a matter for state law.
More important, the new platform commits Republicans to protecting access to contraception, and in vitro fertilization — a reproductive technology which has condemned millions of laboratory created embryos — deserving of the right to life, according to Catholic theology — either to indefinite cryogenic suspension, or to death.
For political expediency, the Republican platform dropped its alignment with the “preeminent priority” articulated by the bishops, and actually promised support, presumably legislative support, for a technology which threatens the right to life of “our most vulnerable and voiceless brothers and sisters” — the unborn victims of in vitro fertilization.
Professional pro-life political figures have adapted — somewhat surprisingly — to the Republicans’ changes.
In April, for example, the Susan B. Anthony List, which says it works to elect pro-life candidates to national office, said it was “deeply disappointed” when Donald Trump suggested that abortion should be regulated only at the state level, and that efforts toward a federal ban should be dropped.
“Unborn children and their mothers deserve national protections and national advocacy from the brutality of the abortion industry,” SBA’s Marjorie Dannenfelser said April 8.
But this week, after the GOP approved platform changes, Dannenfelser took a new position in support of the changes, arguing that “the Republican Party remains strongly pro-life at the national level,” and that the change which she had opposed in April “allows us to provide the winning message to 10 million voters.”
It is not clear whether bishops, though, will be as willing to be quite so politically pliable in their guidance to Catholics.
For many Catholics, fidelity to the traditional weighing exercise proposed by “Faithful Citizenship” might now seem to make it very difficult to vote for a national candidate of either major party, given that both platforms now express legislative support for the kind of moral evil which threatens the lives of the unborn.
And while many bishops have previously framed election guidance as a binary choice hinging on abortion, the fact that neither party now has an official agenda to oppose abortion at the federal level — and indeed, both party platforms support practices which discard the lives of the unborn — could leave bishops split along new lines over exactly what guidance to emphasize in their guidance to Catholics.
Some of the bishops committed to defending the unborn as a “preeminent priority” may decide that the GOP’s shift requires them to emphasize the possibility of voting for third parties with clearer commitments to unborn human life, or not even abstaining from voting for some federal offices.
Those bishops may want their guidance to emphasize that Catholics ought to take a more skeptical and distant position from either major party,.
But other bishops focused on the preeminent priority of the unborn may prefer to emphasize a re-articulation of guidance from “Faithful Citizenship” about voting in order to corral harms: namely, to encourage that Catholics should “vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.”
Those bishops, rather than emphasizing third parties or protest votes, might put their focus on the prospect that on the topic of protecting the unborn, the GOP is still likely to oppose federal funding for abortion, and to argue — at least implicitly — that Catholics should pragmatically choose the “lesser of two evils” in the voting booth.
Those bishops might also choose to emphasize political activism for Catholics at the state level, and the importance of evaluating individual candidates, rather than party platforms.
In short, while bishops talking about the preeminent priority of abortion to this point have tended to mean mostly just one thing — voting for the candidate most likely to restrict abortion or oppose its legal protection — bishops with a genuine desire to protect the unborn may now be much more split on what that actually looks like for Catholic voters.
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While the election itself will be over by the time bishops discuss it, the GOP’s changes could lead to some of the most creative, fractious, and theologically driven discussions among bishops in decades, especially if the changes prove the moment for broad, thoughtful, and creative discussion about the role of Catholics in a secularizing democratic society.
On the other hand, some bishops have told The Pillar that because the GOP changes could make the debate more complicated, at least a faction of prelates might be eager to avoid the conversation at all — and could well urge shelving the idea of a new “Faithful Citizenship,” in favor of issuing shorter, issue-specific guideline documents for Catholics, and skirting the prospect of deep division over a new comprehensive text.
“Nobody wants to go back to the drawing board,” one bishop told The Pillar. “And now it feels like we’d have to go all the way back to square one.”
If it does happen, the project of revising “Faithful Citizenship,” will be a long one — with almost all of it taking place behind closed doors.
But for at least some bishops, a serious commitment to the “utterly vulnerable [and] utterly voiceless” unborn might soon mean a divorce from tacit support for the Republican Party, which has now committed its platform to protecting the destruction of unborn life by in vitro fertilization.
