Story summary:
Thirty local activists who want to mobilize Catholic voters around the full range of Catholic social issues met yesterday to raise awareness. "We are trying to influence the Catholic vote for the common good," said Lois Campbell, the local field organizer for Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which sponsored the meeting. The group plans to run phone banks to urge Catholics to vote with many issues in mind. The alliance believes that Catholics have been frustrated by partisan politics, with the Republican Party claiming opposition to abortion and the Democratic Party claiming support for a social safety net. The group says it is trying to get Catholics to base their electoral decisions on all of these issues.
Thirty local activists who want to mobilize Catholic voters around the full range of Catholic social issues met yesterday to raise awareness.
"We are trying to influence the Catholic vote for the common good," said Lois Campbell, the local field organizer for Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which sponsored the meeting.
The group plans to run phone banks to urge Catholics to vote with many issues in mind.
The alliance believes that Catholics have been frustrated by partisan politics, with the Republican Party claiming opposition to abortion and the Democratic Party claiming support for a social safety net. The group says it is trying to get Catholics to base their electoral decisions on all of these issues.
It has produced a "Platform for the Common Good," based on the preamble to the U.S. Constitution and on a document of the U.S. Catholic bishops, "Faithful Citizenship."
The platform says: "Too many today have lost a sense of a consistent ethic of life, which is harmed in many ways, including by poverty, abortion and capital punishment. Internationally, our economic system has disproportionately benefitted large corporations and their shareholders while millions of U.S. workers and laborers, family farmers in the global south and others often struggle in poverty."
"Catholic social thought is the best kept secret in the Catholic Church," said Christina Astorga, director of the Spiritan Center for the Study of Catholic Social Thought at Duquesne University, which hosted the gathering.
The main speaker was Chris Korzen, executive director of Catholics United, a like-minded organization with more liberty to lobby. His group produced a voter guide comparing John McCain and Barack Obama on 10 areas of public policy.
In 2004, there was little news media interest in covering what the Catholic Church teaches, he said. The emphasis was on activists who claimed it was immoral to vote for one candidate or the other based on one or two issues. "Faithful Citizenship" says that opposition to abortion is foundational and must be seriously taken into account. But it also says that a Catholic may, for serious reasons, vote for a candidate who supports abortion if that is not the reason for supporting the candidate.