Catholic Conscience

Catholic voters considering how to cast their presidential ballots should judge candidates by their passion for building a safer and more humane world, especially for the poor and the weak, retired Washington, D.C., Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and others told an audience at Loyola University this week.

And while the Catholic church believes a candidate's stand on abortion is gravely important -- Archbishop Alfred Hughes has called it "foundational" -- it also urges its members to examine candidates' positions on other serious issues such as torture, war and contempt for the poor, McCarrick said.

With more than 60 million members, Catholics are the largest religious voting bloc in the country. But political scientists have long known there is no monolithic "Catholic vote." The church by long practice does not recommend a candidate.

Because they are so numerous and so widely distributed, Catholics collectively vote much like the country at large, preferring at various times Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Al Gore.

A year before each presidential election, Catholic bishops publish a document that urges Catholics to educate themselves on the candidates, compare their positions to their church's traditional stands on social justice issues and then vote their consciences.

That said, the bishops caution that not all issues are "morally equivalent."

Certain "intrinsic evils," among them abortion and euthanasia, which the Catholic church regards as the intentional taking of human life, are "always wrong and not just one issue among many," according to this year's document, called "Faithful Citizenship."

McCarrick, who took part in a panel discussion at Loyola on Wednesday, called abortion "the gravest of the moral evils today" and the "most weighty thing" in the church's moral analysis of political issues.

At the same time, Catholic voters cannot use a candidate's opposition to abortion or similar evils "to justify indifference or inattentiveness" to other issues touching on human life and dignity, according to the document.