How a Catholic Voter Should Choose a Candidate

Many cardinals, bishops and priests warn that it can be a mortal sin to not vote for the electable candidate who will do the least damage regarding the six non-negotiable moral issues, including the “preeminent issue.”

That “preeminent issue,” of course, is abortion, according to the official position of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

So how does a Catholic vote in order to not commit what these many bishops say is a mortal sin?

Well, it’s an extraordinarily simple, four-step process that has nothing to do with what most Catholics are taught or believe about “voting Catholic.” Bishop Robert F. Vasa used the analogy of a farm combine to explain it: The first sieve in the combine disposes of the largest refuse, just as the first step in voting discards pro-choice candidates.

The logic of these esteemed Churchmen, as described in my book, Catholic Voting and Mortal Sin – Your Vote Can Endanger Your Salvation, goes like this:

Step One: The Catholic voter must first inform his conscience about the mortal sinfulness of voting for a candidate who supports any one of the currently “in-play” intrinsic evils of abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, homosexual “marriage,” human cloning, or opposing religious freedom, if there is no alternative candidate who is better on these issues. (And the Catholic voter does have a duty to so inform his conscience.)

Step Two: He must vote for the candidate who is least supportive of any one or more of these evils.

Step Three: If all candidates are equally bad, or equally good, he can vote for whichever he wishes, based on his own assessment of which would, as the late Father Stephen F. Torraco prescribed, be “most likely to limit the evils of abortion or any other moral evil at issue.”

Step Four: If, and only if, the Catholic voter cannot discern that one candidate would be most likely to limit such evils, then he should base his vote on which candidate best reflects Catholic values on matters that are not intrinsically evil, i.e., matters of prudential judgment.

Many Catholics, however, use Steps Three and Four to rationalize voting for unacceptable candidates.

As to Step Three, it is a matter of degree. As a threshold matter, Bishop Vasa said, “The conditions under which an individual may be able to vote for a pro-abortion candidate would apply only if all the candidates are equally pro-abortion.”

Bishop Robert Finn noted that “we are often faced with ‘imperfect candidates,’” but that where two candidates are permissive on abortion, “we should choose the candidate whose position will likely do the least grave evil, or whose position will do the most to limit the specific grave evil of abortion.”

Bishop Robert Hermann said, “If there were two candidates who supported abortion, but not equally, we would have the obligation to mitigate the evil by voting for the less-permissive candidate.”

The bishops of Kansas issued a joint statement in 2006, instructing voters that “when there is no choice of a candidate that avoids supporting intrinsically evil actions, especially elective  abortion, we should vote in such a way as to allow the least harm to innocent human life and dignity. We would not be acting immorally, therefore, if we were  to vote for a candidate who is not totally acceptable in order to defeat one who poses an even greater threat to human life and dignity.”

Bishop Earl Boyea echoed those sentiments, including two of the six contemporary intrinsic evils in his statement.

“[W]hen there is no choice of a candidate that avoids supporting intrinsically evil actions, especially elective abortion or embryonic stem-cell research, we should vote in such a way as to allow the least harm to innocent human life and dignity,” Boyea wrote in 2008. “We would not be acting immorally, therefore, if we were to vote for a candidate whose positions on these issues are not totally acceptable in order to defeat one who poses an even greater threat to human life and dignity.”

Cardinal James A. Hickey posed the following question that the Catholic voter should ask himself: “[A]s each of us makes a prudential judgment in voting for a new president, we need to ask which candidate will offer even a measure of protection for the unborn. Who is more likely to pierce through the rhetoric and politics of choice in the clear realization that abortion is always a choice to destroy an utterly innocent and defenseless human being?”

Archbishop (now Cardinal) Raymond Burke concurred, with a reminder of the long view. “A Catholic who is clear in his or her opposition to the moral evil of procured abortion could vote for a candidate who supports the limitation of the legality of procured abortion,” he wrote in 2004, “even though the candidate does not oppose all use of procured abortion, if the other candidate(s) do not support the limitation of the evil of procured abortion. Of course, the end in view for the Catholic must always be the total conformity of the civil law with the moral law, that is, ultimately the total elimination of the evil of procured abortion.”

Father Torraco said that the rule given to Catholic politicians by Pope St. John Paul II applies to Catholic voters as well. “[W]hen it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law,” John Paul wrote, “an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and morality.”

Torraco added: “This does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law, but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects. Logically, it follows from these words of the pope that a voter may likewise vote for that candidate who will most likely limit the evils of abortion or any other moral evil at issue.”

As an example of proper moral voting to limit evil, Monsignor Kevin McMahon offers an example: “[W]hen presented with one candidate who is pro-abortion, and another who is both pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia, a voter may conclude that he could prevent more evil by voting for the pro-abortion candidate who does not promote euthanasia as well. This would be similar to a politician’s support for imperfect legislation.”

Virtually any candidate who is anti-abortion is almost certain to be anti-euthanasia also. But a Catholic voter could, possibly, hypothetically, in an alternate universe, be faced with the unlikely choice of one candidate who is anti-abortion but not anti-euthanasia versus a second candidate who is anti-euthanasia but not anti-abortion. A logical application of McMahon’s rule would be for the Catholic voter to assess which candidate would cause less intrinsic evil. Given the far greater number of abortions in the United States, compared to the number of euthanasia murders, the lesser harm would surely be caused by the first candidate, and he should receive the Catholic’s vote.

Is all of this “limiting” a matter of choosing the lesser evil? On that unimportant, though purely academic question, bishops have varied, if only semantically. But it’s an interesting question, nonetheless. “Recall the traditional Catholic principle of choosing the lesser evil,” observed Bishop Vincent De Paul Breen, of the Diocese of Metuchen. “When faced with two options, neither of which is entirely good, one may choose the lesser evil. This enables us to give morality a voice and to vote for whoever will best promote our Christian concerns.”

But Archbishop Burke again saw it less a finite decision, and more a mere offensive blow in the ongoing battle against abortion. “A Catholic may vote for a candidate who, while he supports an evil action, also supports the limitation of the evil involved, if there is no better candidate,” he wrote in 2004. “For example, a candidate may support procured abortion in a limited number of cases but be opposed to it otherwise. In such a case, the Catholic who recognizes the immorality of all procured abortions may rightly vote for this candidate over another, more unsuitable candidate in an effort to limit the circumstances in which procured abortions would be considered legal.

“Here the intention of the Catholic voter, unable to find a viable candidate who would stop the evil of procured abortion by making it illegal, is to reduce the number of abortions by limiting the circumstances in which it is legal. This is not a question of choosing the lesser evil, but of limiting all the evil one is able to limit at the time.”

Step 4 in this winnowing process is triggered only when the Catholic voter sincerely concludes that all of the candidates are precisely the same on abortion and euthanasia. This could mean, strictly theoretically, that the candidates are equally pro-abortion or equally anti-abortion. In this scenario, a Catholic is left to consider the many remaining moral issues where his own prudential judgment, providing it conforms to Catholic teaching, may be used to select a candidate.

Drawing on the language of the USCCB’s document, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, Bishops Kevin Farrell of Dallas and Kevin Vann of Fort Worth explained that if “both candidates running for office support abortion or ‘abortion rights,’ a Catholic would be forced to then look at the other important issues and through their vote try to limit the evil done.”

Bishop Vasa elaborated on this instruction, using an example where the candidates are equally pro-abortion. In that case, he explained, “you begin to screen for the other issues and make a conscientious decision to vote for this pro-abortion candidate because his positions on these other issues are more in keeping with good Catholic values. It doesn’t mean that you in any way support or endorse a pro-abortion position, but you take a look in that context at the lesser of two evils.”

An unfortunate choice, yes, but each of us Catholics has a moral duty to vote for somebody, despite what many churchmen preach and laymen believe, in order, as Cardinal Burke put it, to limit “all the evil one is able to limit.”

– This piece is derived from Mr. Lewis’s book, Catholic Voting and Mortal Sin – Your Vote Can Endanger Your Salvation, available at Amazon.com (amzn.to/49Lc4fi) and other booksellers.