Catholic Principles on How to Vote
31st Sunday of the Year
We are on the cusp of a general election, the significance of which hardly needs repeating. As divine providence would have it, the Lord gives us in the Gospel today the two great commandments: to love God and to love neighbor. These commandments are not simply the most important rules we must follow; they are the axiomatic, first principles on which God has decreed our entire lives ought to be based. They are, therefore, foundational to our approach to politics as Christians.
So, I want to talk about politics—and, specifically, how to vote. No, I will not tell you who to vote for; and I have not veiled any kind of endorsement behind my words. What I want to say about voting and engaging in politics is far more general, but don’t mistake generality for irrelevance to our current situation. The scholar of the law approached Jesus asking not for advice in this situation or that. He asked about the general rules, the universal laws that order life. We also need guiding principles, because without them we will get lost in the complexities of each individual situation and end up contradicting ourselves from issue to issue. Love God and love neighbor are like two stars in the night sky, and if we look up when we are disoriented to find them, they will guide us safely and surely back to following God’s will.
Throughout the Church’s history, governments have both persecuted the Church and been controlled by the Church; and what the exact relationship should be between Church and State is a matter of debate on both sides. What we can say with certainty, however, is that being Christian does not limit us to one candidate or party over another. Being Christian means that the manner in which we engage in civic life must be animated by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which proclaims the arrival of the Kingdom of God in the midst of the kingdom of man. And before we are citizens of this nation or any other, we are citizens and ambassadors of the Kingdom that is not of this world. The whole of Christ’s teaching, summarized in the two commandments to love God and neighbor, are the laws of the citizens of the Kingdom of God. And it is our solemn and sacred duty, before all else, to follow them faithfully and apply them fervently in every aspect of our lives.
Distilling these two commandments, I want to give you three principles for voting and engaging in political life as a Catholic. What I’m going to say is repeated in a slightly different form in this Sunday’s bulletin for later reference.
(1) The first and greatest commandment to love God “with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength” means that we must give reverence first and foremost to God and, by consequence, to see every other person who holds authority on earth as not only secondary to God but, in fact, acting only in his stead. There is a lovely mosaic in the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière overlooking the city of Lyons that depicts the king and queen of France holding their crowns in the hands and presenting them to Our Lady, Queen of Heaven and Earth. Compare that attitude with the covetous Deneathor in The Lord of the Rings who refuses to relinquish his role of steward at the return of the king: “Gondor has no king, Gondor needs to king.” Our political leaders are, at best, stewards of a throne that is not ultimately theirs. Rather, Christ alone is “King of kings and Lord of lords,” and “to him belongs dominion for ever and ever” (Rev. 19:16; 5:13). Good political leaders do not, inherently, need to be Catholic; yet what they must not fail to recognize is that their power is not absolute but, rather, a participation in the divine power that rules all things. A tyrant is one who sees themselves ruling as God.
(2) The second principle, which follows from the first, is that the laws which political leaders create are only legitimate laws insofar as they are in keeping with God’s eternal law which governs all creation. This teaching was articulated in the 4th century by St. Augustine and repeated in the 13th century by St. Thomas Aquinas and applied in the 20th century by Martin Luther King, Jr.: “An unjust law is no law at all.” There is an order by which everything in the cosmos is ruled. What keeps Jupiter on its orbit and what moves the squirrel to search for nuts is nothing other than God’s eternal law ordering the cosmos to its proper end. We as humans with a rational intellect have the privilege of knowing God’s eternal law as it pertains to our lives, as we can use our minds to discover what is called the natural law. Yet we as Catholics have a greater advantage. God has also revealed his law through Scripture and Tradition and given us the Church to interpret divine revelation authentically. We, in effect, know God’s mind and can, therefore, evaluate the laws that governments make and judge whether or not they fit into the divine law of God. So whenever a politician puts forward a “law” that violates God’s law, then our first loyalty to Christ the Lord requires us to resist and reject it. And this is where Catholics should feel that they have no home, “no lasting city” as Scripture says (Heb. 13:14), because no politician, party, or platform gets everything right. Even the best-intentioned either fail to see the whole or fall victim to compromise. So, in deciding how to vote, we need to weigh out what’s most important and throw our support behind those who would do the most good, or alternatively, the least evil, evaluating all they would propose to do in light of the law of God.
(3) Following from the second, the third principle is this: the good that we should care about the most is the good of the poor. Our primary motivation for voting as Catholics should not be for who will make us richer. Gas prices, taxes, food costs, and all other economic considerations, important as they are, are only important in the final analysis insofar as they impact the most vulnerable members of our society. The whole of the Church’s social teaching stems from the commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” To think about their best interest, to fight for their health and prosperity, to stand up in their defense, to advocate on their behalf—not ours—is the call of the Gospel. So, this leads us to think of those who have no voice: the unborn, the immigrant, the homeless, the refugee. And if we see caring for any of those categories of people as “what my political opponents care about but I don’t,” then we ought to take a closer look at who Jesus defines as our “neighbor.” Actually, he doesn’t define it. Our neighbor is everyone, the whole human family, spread throughout the entire world. In another Gospel passage, when asked a similar question about “who is my neighbor,” the Lord responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Christ challenges us to think of others, particularly the poor, before ourselves. Our engaging in political life should not, primarily, be to make our lives more comfortable, but for others to have and enjoy the basic rights and benefits that they ought to have.
Before you head to the polls on Tuesday, it would be worth your time to ask Jesus who you should vote for. I wouldn’t expect him to give you a straight answer. But if you ask that question genuinely and think about his response to the scholar of the law which we heard today, I would trust him to push you toward those dispositions and concerns that belong properly to citizens of the Kingdom of God. From that, you will have to make a judgment and come to a decision. I suppose on the last day he will tell us whether or not we got it right. But if we have taken our political responsibility as Catholics seriously, we will be able to tell him we have earnestly prayed and strived to live, “thy Kingdom come, thy will be done.”
Homily preached November 3, 2024 at Mount St. Mary’s University