As the United States heads into another presidential election, talk inevitably surfaces about the “Catholic vote.” It is worth recalling as discussions heat up that Catholic voters in the 2004 presidential election boosted a born-again Protestant over a Catholic by approximately 1.6 million votes. In fact, George W. Bush’s Catholic victory accounted for more than half his total popular vote margin over John Kerry.

Numbers like that will keep media and politicians looking for the magic formula that garners allegiance from the country’s largest denomination. They’re especially curious about what will pull in Catholics now, when no presumed candidate is a Catholic, neither Barack Obama nor John McCain.

What made it work for Bush? The candidates would love to know.

According to John Carr, executive director of social development and world peace for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the question runs deeper than allegiance to a political party. Catholics take their cue from Christ, not from the polls, he said.

“We are not the Democratic Party at Prayer. We are not the Religious Caucus of the Republican Party. We are a community of faith,” Carr said.

Carr was making his point at Creighton University here, where he gave the keynote address at a symposium called “Faithful Citizenship: Principles and Strategies to Serve the Common Good.” At the mid-April symposium, scholars from Catholic universities across the country grappled with the idea of how the church can insert its teachings into the national political discussion.

Carr’s presentation was an explanation and at times a defense of the U.S. bishops’ most recent document on faith and politics, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States,” which promises to “help Catholics form their consciences in accordance with God’s truth.”

More than any other issue, abortion unsurprisingly drove the debate about which concerns should lead Catholics to make political decisions.

Carr made the point several times that when more than 1 million U.S. abortions occur each year, those who regard it as murder have a moral obligation to make it a political priority.

However, Carr stressed that the bishops’ document does not shut the door on any candidate, not even one who supports abortion rights. He pointed to a caveat in the document: “There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may 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.”

The word “evil” appears in the most recent “Faithful Citizenship” document 16 times. The phrase “intrinsic evil” or “intrinsically evil” is directly applied to five issues -- abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, destructive research on human embryos, and racism.

This type of categorization didn’t sit well with all participants. David J. O’Brien, professor emeritus of history at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., said in his presentation that though church officials have taken “strong stands” on such issues as war, poverty and immigration, “they are rarely spoken of in church and are clearly not considered definitive for Catholics.” And Jesuit Fr. David Hollenbach cautioned that that the issues of abortion and stem-cell research have hijacked other critical issues such as torture, unjust wars and economic disparity.

Hollenbach, who holds the chair in Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College, said that polls suggest a clear distinction between moral issues bishops view as beyond debate for Catholics, and those laypeople believe they can decide for themselves. For example, he pointed to a 2005 study showing that 84 percent believe helping the poor is very important to their lives as Catholics while 44 percent said the same about the church’s teachings on abortion.

“Lists of evils, intrinsic or otherwise, and condemnations of actions or persons, are just what we do not need from the church and its leaders, if we are to inspire action for the common good,” he concluded.

The “Faithful Citizenship” document does warn against the temptation of ignoring other issues in the light of one specific evil. Several less controversial presentations focused on the connection between race and poverty as it was revealed in the light of Hurricane Katrina; the need for more local church leadership in combating climate change; the consequences of a poor U.S. immigration policy; and U.S. military policy.