The following is a summary of three columns on civic participation and voting that Cardinal George has written in the Catholic New World over the past several months. The full text of these columns may be found on the Catholic New World website at www.catholicnewworld.com.

Much in the news these days are stories of Catholic politicians whose public positions diverge from the moral teachings of the faith they profess. Usually these stories are framed as instances of Church-State conflict: authoritarian bishops trying to impose sectarian dogmas on brave politicians striving to represent all their constituents. This misrepresents the issue. In this country, Church and State are institutionally separate; but in this country and anywhere else in the world, faith and life are not.

Faith is a free assent of mind and will and heart to a God who loves us and who transforms every dimension of our lives (Romans 10:9). There is no area of a believer’s life separate from his or her faith. A compartmentalized faith is not faith, certainly not Catholic faith, which begins with the proclamation that Jesus is risen from the dead and then works out the implications of that assertion in every area of life. To work out those implications in every age, Jesus gave authority to the apostles to govern his Church and teach in his name. There is separation of Church and State at the heart of our faith – the king is not a priest – but there can be no separation of faith and life for either king or priest or anyone else who believes that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.

The particular form of institutional separation of Church and State that we enjoy in the United States limits the State from imposing a particular Church upon anyone; but it also permits a religious body to have a public life. Freedom of religion cannot be reduced to freedom of self-expression for believers or freedom to worship quietly as long as faith exercises no influence on the public conversation which shapes society. The message of Christ and his promise of eternal life carries judgments about all dimensions of this life, including cultural and economic and political life.

Faith shapes a believer’s political conscience, whether as voter or officeholder. But drawing conclusions about the public order from one’s faith is viewed with suspicion in the case of evangelicals and with alarm in the case of Catholics. This is largely because the secular litmus test for judging if faith is interfering inappropriately in the public order for the past 30 years has been the issue of the legal protection of unborn human beings. This truly is a key issue, not only because abortion is intrinsically immoral in every instance, but also because the legal killing of the unborn undermines the respect for human life that has characterized the advance of civilization and separates us from barbarians.

In a pluralistic society, perhaps no faith group can expect to be totally satisfied with the legal system; every faith group, however, can expect politicians who belong to it to work out their political positions in the light of their professed faith and to act accordingly. Not bishops, but the politicians’ personal integrity makes this demand.

The United States has the most barbaric pro-abortion legal system in the world. Almost every other Western democracy places limits on abortion according to time into pregnancy and other considerations. Because the U.S. courts have made abortion a “right,” placing limits on its exercise creates difficulties not found in other countries. In this situation, it is unacceptable for a Catholic believer who is a politician to embrace unreservedly the status quo on abortion. Such an embrace cannot be justified because of a few theologians’ opinions or even should a majority of U.S. Catholics think differently; nor can it be justified in the name of personal conscience, which is to be shaped by the faith. It certainly cannot be justified by an appeal to the Second Vatican Council, which named abortion “a heinous crime.”

Now we are in a period of political decision-making. While the Church speaks to many issues about human life, about economic justice, about war and peace, the really neuralgic point in American political debate for three decades has been legal protection for aborting a baby, of whom over 40 million have been killed since abortion on demand was legalized by the Supreme Court. This is a crime against humanity itself, and would be so even if the Catholic Church did not exist. Abortion is intrinsically evil; it is not wrong because the Church declares it sinful. Opposition to abortion is no more a uniquely Catholic moral position than is opposition to stealing.

Nevertheless, the Catholic Church’s clear and consistent teaching over 2,000 years about the immorality of abortion creates a particularly acute moral challenge to the conscience of Catholic officeholders and voters in the United States. Making and keeping civil laws is always a matter of conscience. Conscience in our culture is individualistic, grounded in the conviction that each person can decide what is right or wrong or even what is true or false. The first challenge in talking about participating in politics with a Catholic conscience, therefore, is to come to understand what conscience really is.

Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray was the American theologian of the last generation who contributed most significantly to the Vatican II declaration on religious liberty. Moving from the state’s obligation to respect religious liberty to considering the individual citizen, however, the document, according to Fr. Murray, does not “support the theory that I have the right to do what my conscience tells me to do simply because my conscience tells me to do it.” This is the perilous theory that “in the end it is my conscience and not the objective truth which determines what is right or wrong, true or false.” That actions have a moral quality in themselves and that conscience has to conform to objective truth in religion and morality runs against the prevalent conviction that sincerity justifies any action.

Always basic to every other consideration of the common good is the defense of every human life. Pope John Paul II said at the end of his visit to this country twenty five years ago: “If a person’s right to life is violated at the moment in which he is first conceived in his mother’s womb, an indirect blow is struck also at the whole moral order which serves to ensure the inviolable goods of man. Among those goods, life occupies the first place.” The defense of every human life, no matter how weak or poor it may be, is not just one of a laundry list of moral concerns. It is key to pursuing the common good.  

That abortion is intrinsically immoral is clear to many and is clearly taught to all Catholics. Some Catholics would argue, however, that not everything immoral need be illegal and that abortion, while always immoral, is so fundamentally ensconced in our American way of life that any attempt to outlaw it now would destroy social peace. It must therefore be tolerated precisely for the common good.  

That argument makes its point, however, only if the one making it is working actively to change attitudes toward abortion with a view of eventually coming to protect in law every unborn child. Because it is hard to see how one can make the argument in good conscience while proclaiming abortion a “right” and vowing to protect it all costs, many Catholics have lost patience with politicians who claim to share their faith while piling up a completely “pro-choice” voting record. The U.S. Bishops last June, bringing once again the question of conscience to participation in political life, said that voting to protect legal abortion is a form of cooperating in the evil of abortion itself.

Do all Catholic politicians understand their obligations in conscience? Apparently not, which means that their pastors have to take the time to speak with them personally. A pastoral conversation about the formation of conscience is not an interference in the political process. It is an exercise in pastoral charity, motivated by a desire for a politician’s salvation. The politician will someday be asked by the Lord: “What did you do to the least of my brothers and sisters?” And the pastor will be asked by the same Lord: “What did you do to warn them?  How did you help them form their conscience?” Like Lazarus, the poor man ignored by the rich man until it was too late for the rich man to be saved (Luke 16: 19-31), those killed in their mother’s womb will be at the gates of paradise but unable to come to the assistance of those condemned to hell because they killed unborn children or supported their being killed.

May the Lord be good to us and give us the courage to participate in political life with consciences truly formed by the faith that comes to us from the apostles.  God bless you.