Why this Catholic cannot vote for the Catholic candidate
Earlier this month, someone sent me the link to a homily that had been delivered by Father Ed Meeks at Christ the King Church in Towson, Md. The video had gone viral among Catholics, because it was a very obvious, very deliberate, very clear attempt on the part of this pastor to express his condemnation of Joe Biden. The condemnation was based purely upon faith principles, and was not meant to tell parishioners how they should vote. That is not permissible, nor would it be fair to hold a group of American citizens hostage to a political speech in a house of worship. But it was an important, and legitimate, attempt by this man of God to elucidate for his flock why they needed to be cognizant of what they were doing, as Catholics, if they voted for one of the very few Catholics ever to run for the highest office.
I watched Father Meek’s speech, which you can also do here (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RsloAGoG1Ao), in preparation for my own lecture at the Basilica of St. Peter and Paul this past week. Wednesday evening, I addressed a group of socially distanced, engaged Catholic voters on how we can reconcile our faith with our obligations as American citizens. I share much of the priest’s views on what we need to consider as people of my particular faith as we go to the polls. I also reviewed Archbishop Charles Chaput’s book “Render Unto Caesar,” which is my own private catechism for how to live a coherent life, where the secular and the religious are complementary, not in conflict. And of course, I reread Mario Cuomo’s now legendary remarks given in 1984 at Notre Dame University. All of these sources provided some guidance for the topic of my lecture, “Built Upon Rock: Finding Your Footing in A Time of Great Turmoil.” The reason we chose this particular topic at this particular moment is because there is a very good possibility that a baptized Catholic will become the highest elected official in the nation, only the second time in our history. If that happens, we need to examine what that means for those of us who, like Father Meeks and myself, oppose this Catholic’s politics on some very fundamental issues.
The lecture coincided with the 25th anniversary of Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II’s encyclical on the Gospel of Life. The central theme of the encyclical, broken down into four parts, is the value of human life in every form and iteration, and was meant to act as “a pressing appeal addressed to each and every person, in the name of God, to respect, protect, love and serve life, every human life.”
My hope was to explain why, even though Biden’s policies do serve that mandate to respect life in some of its forms, particularly where he wants to provide health care for the ill, mitigate the existence of racism in our criminal justice system and ease the burdens on immigrants in our society, they fall far short in one aspect which the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops has called “pre eminent” namely, the right to life itself. Biden, as Father Meeks noted, is a strong advocate of abortion on demand, and of expanding abortion rights to the extent that he would abolish the Hyde Amendment and force U.S. taxpayers to fund non-therapeutic abortions. He would also reinstate the mandate on the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide birth control for employees, would eliminate the gag rule, would protect funding to Planned Parenthood and would make sure that Roe v. Wade became enshrined as constitutional principle, through an amendment if necessary. And it is quite clear that a Supreme Court candidate like Amy Coney Barrett would never be appointed under his administration.
On the other hand, Donald Trump has a terrible record when it comes to immigrants, and I am closer to that than most people since it is my life’s work defending immigrants and refugees against possible deportation. Unlike Mary Gay Scanlon and her Democrat col
leagues in D.C. who have engaged in high profile photo ops at the border, I deal with these issues every day, in obscurity, trying to figure out how to fulfill our Christian obligation to minister to the “least of these.” I am also cognizant of the fact that Trump would do away with the ACA without having an alternative, at least not before November 3. On the other hand, he has been the most pro-life president in modern times, and even though some have argued that his heart is not in it and he does it for political effect, I don’t care, and the unborn children don’t care.
Here is how I framed the dilemma:
“While the right to be free from poverty, from abuse, from discrimination and all the other evils of the world, is sacred, it is irrelevant if the threshold right is violated, namely, the right to life. While an immigrant fleeing torture must be protected, sheltered and raised up, we cannot even render those mercies if that immigrant is not al
lowed to live in the first place, is not given the right to breathe freely and fulfill the destiny vouchsafed to him by God. We can talk about all of the evils in the world, but we cannot even begin to address those evils if we ignore the greatest evil, namely, the nihilistic, almost totalitarian view that we are the ones who decides who lives and who dies.”
And that is what separates me from Mario Cuomo, who believed that a Catholic could straddle his obligations to his faith and respect life at all of its stages, while not “imposing” those beliefs on others. A properly formed Catholic conscience cares for every weak and threatened vessel of life, every bit of humanity, and of course it does not stop at birth. But it cannot begin there, either.
I understand, as a good friend of mine who is struggling with these choices as well said to me, that we cannot be one-issue voters and expect to be considered to have “a Catholic conscience.” Also,
a president is not the final word on whether abortion and euthanasia and these other assaults on the dignity of life will be criminalized. But a president who actively works to enshrine abortion and euthanasia in our laws and presumes to do this for the welfare and “individual liberty” of all Americans is not someone who reflects the values of an encyclical that, 25 years later, has become even more crucial to our survival as a moral, human society.
That is what I said. That is what I believe. It is in some ways an agonizing choice as a Catholic, one who would exult in seeing a fellow Catholic in the White House, someone who reflects my values. But as liberals often say about conservative women not being the “right sort of woman,” Joe Biden is not the “right sort of Catholic,” for me.