The Congress is holding hearings regarding the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.
I think they will confirm her. Whether she holds to her promise not to let her own private beliefs sway her decision-making - well, I can't imagine.
I am a Catholic, but not a single-issue voter. I am against abortion, but I won't vote for Donald Trump.
My relatives, high school classmates, former students, and friends who are single-issue voters keep raving at me about this, but there it is.
Anyway, here is an article I like:
Bishop Seitz: Single-issue voting has corrupted
Christian political witness
Bishop Mark Seitz
September 30,2020
One day last year, I found myself waiting motionless,
jammed in a confined space between concrete barriers, razor wire and armed
border guards. I stood tensely under the burning desert summer sun in a dusty
no man’s land on the international border between the United States and Mexico.
I was holding the hand of a young, dark-skinned girl with brown hair, and my
anxiety grew as we looked toward the United States, just feet away, and at the
guards barring our entry.
Back in her home country, the girl’s aunts and uncles had
been assassinated. If she had not traveled with her family 2,000 miles to the
U.S. border, she might have shared the same fate. But after a long and perilous
journey and having survived kidnapping attempts, there she was, waiting to
legally petition for asylum at a time when hard-line immigration policies
like family separation and forced returns to Mexico have made such an act dangerous.
I tried putting myself in that child’s shoes. I felt fear
and vertigo. I felt the overwhelming weight of bureaucratic indifference and
abstract government policy positioned against the vulnerability of a child. For
a brief instant I felt what it must be like to be on the outside-looking-in of
an exclusionary system of power. I felt fragile.
That experience of fragility deeply shaped my understanding of
the social commitment of Christians.
That experience of fragility deeply shaped my
understanding of the social commitment of Christians. I realized that our
political commitment as Christians is less about seeking self-interest,
accessing privilege and influencing power, and more about standing in solidarity
with those forced to the margins of the systems we create.
The presidential election is fast approaching. Elections
are a critical way we take an active role shaping the common good. We naturally
project our hopes and desires for a resolution to the pains now afflicting our
country onto that important moment when we cast our ballot.
A deep faith rooted in love is moved by the fragility of
others and unsettled by systems that cheapen human dignity. For Christians, the
ecstatic experience of being taken out of ourselves and into the drama of the
reign of God opens us up to the horizon of the common good. As Benedict
XVI said, “the more we strive to
secure a common good corresponding to the real needs of our neighbors, the more
effectively we love them.” We get involved in building the common good because,
as St. Óscar Romero said in his last words
before being killed, “every effort to better a society, especially one that is
so enmeshed in injustice and in sin, is an effort that God blesses, that God
desires, that God demands of us.”
The experience of the nearness of Jesus and the love of
God, our common Father, creates in us a new mindset: We are dependent, we need
one another and we really are responsible for one another. This is what the
virtue of solidarity is all about, the recognition that our destinies are woven
together or they are not woven at all. Human fragility is not to be denied or
demonized or hidden away, but met with love and compassion and solidarity.
As Sister Thea Bowman put
it so beautifully, “God’s glory is revealed because we love one another across
the barriers and boundaries of race, culture and class.”
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Our vote is but one expression of this all-encompassing
commitment to the common good and the project of building up solidarity.
Solidarity in Suffering
In the last several months, the wind has been knocked out
of us by a major pandemic that has left many, especially the poor and people of
color, with no lifeboat. We have also seen how the promise of equality
contained in our founding documents has been deferred again and again because
we cannot confess with one voice—as church or country—what should be
self-evident, that Black lives matter. The individualism rampant in our social,
political and economic life is rending the body politic and the body of Christ.
But there is a lesson in all of this. As Pope Francis recently put it,
“having failed to show solidarity in wealth and in the sharing of resources, we
have learned to experience solidarity in suffering.” The Lord is teaching us
solidarity by schooling us in fragility.
The individualism rampant in our social, political and economic
life is rending the body politic and the body of Christ.
As pastor of a portion of the people of God located on
the U.S.-Mexico border, a majority of whom are Latino, I see the deep
interrelatedness of the issues affecting our people and endangering our sacred
environment. Our communities are buckling under history, under racism and under
Covid-19. The lack of opportunities and social supports available to our
children do not match the height of their aspirations and dignity, and they are
at risk of falling even further behind under the weight of the pandemic. This
generation of our children was also sadly witness to the largest mass killing
of Latinos in modern history, which took the lives of 23 of our neighbors last
year in an act of racial terror in El Paso. In all of this suffering it is made abundantly clear
that, in the words of the pope,
“none of us is saved alone.”
What are the possibilities before us at the ballot box
for a credible project of solidarity in this historical moment? We require
leadership with character and experience, capable of expressing a moral vision
to resist the harsh individualism and lack of solidarity fueling the multiple
crises we face. We are desperately in need of genuine leadership and vision
to overcome ingrained attitudes of being “masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters”
and to re-learn to “speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our
relationship with the world.”
In an aggressively secular and hyper-competitive world,
we should be grateful for the public respect for Pope Francis shown by the
Democratic nominee, former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the values
of the working-class ethos that Mr. Biden aims to project. We should recognize,
too, the step forward represented by the selection of Senator Kamala Harris as
his running mate. Our daughters and sons need to see women reflected in our
nation’s highest leadership. As a bishop on the border, I am also encouraged by
the Biden campaign’s promises to address climate change, create a path to
citizenship for the undocumented, restore protections for asylum seekers and
never repeat the criminal practice of separating families at the border.
The Moral Challenge of Abortion
We must also acknowledge the stumbling block created for
religious voters by the Democratic Party’s ever-stronger commitment to
promoting abortion without any sensible restrictions, including Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris’s support for the repeal of the
Hyde Amendment, which threatens to break the last
surviving bipartisan compromise in a decades-long stalemate over Roe v. Wade.
Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have also committed to re-igniting debates over
constitutionally protected matters of religious liberty that broad majorities
on the Supreme Court have attempted to put to rest, provoking real fears on the
part of the church’s charitable institutions of another chapter in the culture
wars.
The deepening dogmatism of the Democratic Party on
abortion is an inescapable moral challenge. But Catholics also need to recognize
that we are living out the collateral effects of a misbegotten decades-long
settlement between certain groups of political and religious leaders on the
right. For far too long, in pursuit of “single-issue” strategies to end
abortion, many Christians have scandalously turned a blind eye to real
breakdowns in solidarity and dehumanizing policies, including crackdowns on
worker rights and voting rights, the slashing of social support for the poor
and sick, racism and the exploitation of immigrants and the environment.
All of this has backfired and contributed to the issue’s
intractability, widened the polarization in our society, harmed the credibility
of the commitment of Christians to the common good and compromised the
integrity of our Gospel witness.
Pope Francis has repeatedly challenged American Catholics
to reframe our approach to abortion. The Holy Father is clear:
Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to
be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life,
which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or
her stage of development. Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor,
those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the
vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of
human trafficking, new forms of slavery and every form of rejection.
We must repudiate any compromise of the moral integrity
of the church’s witness through partisan alignment with single-issue political
strategies disconnected from an integral ethic of human life. The moral and
ontological pre-eminence of human life is gravely undermined by narrow
political stratagems corrosive of the common good. Our concern and advocacy for
life must embrace all of the marginalized and excluded, or it will ring hollow.
At the same time, we should also recognize that the individualistic
reduction of abortion to a question of so-called “reproductive rights” brackets
this fundamental social issue from any common moral analysis, as if the
question of abortion carried no moral weight at all. It also displaces our
attention from society’s duty to support the real economic and social needs of
women, expectant mothers and families, where we are sorely lacking.
President Donald Trump has voiced his support for unborn
life and taken steps toward defending life, like the reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy.
Likewise, he has taken positive steps to protect religious liberties. But the
president has also tainted the pro-life cause with the individualism and cult
of wealth, greed and celebrity that very quickly erode solidarity and cheapen
life. And he has undermined the foundational importance of religious liberty
with actions like travel bans targeting Muslims. Supported by a pagan aesthetic of self-assertion and
buoyed by a destructive politics of fear and xenophobia, his administration has
encouraged the worst expressions of nativism.
And this is dangerously taxing the durability of our democratic institutions.
It is painfully ironic that one party claims to stand
with undocumented families and unaccompanied children but not the unborn, and
the other claims to stand with the unborn but not the undocumented. But the church
will always define herself as that community which stands with whoever is
considered unworthy of belonging.
But the church will always define herself as that community
which stands with whoever is considered unworthy of belonging.
Over the past several years and decades, politicians on
both sides, including both current presidential candidates, have contributed to
the weakening of solidarity and the erosion of the common good in ways that
should make us ask hard questions of both candidates now. The bishops of the
United States and many moral leaders have long raised their voices against the
abandonment of all restraints on an economy driven by greed, the weakening of
protections for the poor and working class, the lack of access to affordable
health care, laws that have led to the over-incarceration of people of color
and militarized our local police departments, the unjust Iraq War, the
extrajudicial killings of innocents by drones, trade deals that treat labor and
the environment as collateral damage, and unacceptable delays on immigration
reform. In short, we require moral leadership that will credibly address our
country’s longstanding abasement by what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. termed “the
triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism.”
I share the pain, frustration and confusion facing
Catholic voters this year at what feels like an impossible binary choice.
Catholics who wish to take the demands of our faith and social teaching
seriously have long had reason to feel politically homeless at election time.
Neither party and neither presidential candidate reflects in a consistent way
the ethic of love and life expressed by Jesus in the Gospels. Both parties have
been influenced by both the individualism long lurking in American life and by
Dr. King’s triple evils.
Voting requires a well-formed conscience and an exercise
of prudence after prayerful discernment on the part of each voter of all the
issues at stake. Our commitment is not to the abstractions of party platforms
but to the particularity of the human suffering in our midst and the concrete
possibilities for a project of solidarity and human emancipation before us. God
never asks of us the impossible but only to achieve the justice possible in the
imperfect world of the here and now. We must sincerely weigh all of the complex
issues facing our nation and prayerfully reflect on the sacredness and equal
dignity of all human life as well our duty to steward God’s creation.
Catholics may still arrive at different conclusions as to
for whom to vote. But however we vote, God will judge us by the authenticity of
our commitment to continuing to stand with all those forced to the margins of
our society, even after Election Day. Our vote for candidates at every level of
government, from local school boards to the highest levels of national
government, is just one expression of that commitment.
It is helpful to remember that the great democratic
achievements in our country—the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, civil
rights, labor rights, the antiwar movement, the pro-life movement—belong first
not to presidents or politicians but to you and me and others driven by moral
vision and inspired by faith. Better political leadership at the top will come
from critique and action rooted in human experience below. In the words of Pope Francis,
“the future of humanity does not lie solely in the hands of great leaders, the
great powers and the elites. It is fundamentally in the hands of peoples and in
their ability to organize.”
