As in every year divisible by four, Americans will elect a president in November 2024. While the major parties’ respective primary processes have already begun, the turn of the new year focuses our national attention on this quadrennial circus. After the parties nominate their respective candidates sometime in late spring or early summer, those nominees will commence slinging rhetorical bombs at one another, further sinking American political culture into the slough of despond.
As in the last several presidential elections, this one is a challenge to conscientious Catholics who want to apply the entirety of Catholic moral thought to our voting decisions. Thus, for Catholics, the presidential election is the occasion to revisit our commitment to the teachings of the Church as we consider preferred candidates and public-policy issues (something Catholics in the UK will also have to contend with come their own election time).
Of course, the determination of a candidate’s fitness for one’s vote involves several considerations, both objective and subjective. Objectively, one examines the moral rhetoric and policy positions that the candidate advocates, whether through speeches or campaign websites and literature. While the powers of the administrative branch are checked by the legislative and judicial branches, the president’s moral positions still wield considerable influence over the making and interpreting of laws.
Moreover, as the US has increasingly become a regulatory state, the ability of the president to shape policy has become more far-reaching. The president appoints the policy makers who run the various regulatory agencies which, of course, implement the president’s moral agenda. Nonetheless, the candidates are mostly straightforward about the objective moral positions that inform their policy agendas; they can be judged relatively easily.
More difficult are the subjective considerations of a candidate’s worthiness for our vote. We must take into account the candidate’s mental acuity, moral probity, emotional stability and psychological fitness. If the polls are accurate about who the likely nominees will be, Catholics will not have an obvious choice among the parties’ respective aspirants.
Some might argue, in fact, that Catholics will not have a choice that they can select in good conscience at all, either from the standard of objective policy positions or subjective moral fitness. One candidate is likely to be an inveterate narcissist (and probable felon) who foments wacko conspiracy theories. The other is a cognitively and morally compromised Catholic who not only denies major aspects of Catholic moral theology, but actively works against them.
Having said that, two substantial and vocal groups of self-identifying Catholics think that the choice is an easy one. These are the two branches of cafeteria Catholics for whom, mirabile dictu, every major moral doctrine of the Catholic Church exactly coincides with the platform of one of the two major parties. On the Right (a term I dislike, but which is handy for its recognisability), are those whose vision of Catholic morality begins and ends with abortion; on the Left (ditto the reservation), are those for whom, broadly speaking, “social justice” is the sole consideration.
The phrase “cafeteria Catholic” is usually used by as a pejorative by the Right to describe their opponents on the Left. Those “social justice” Catholics pick and choose the Catholic doctrines that please their moral palates and ignore or even decline others, so the accusation goes. These folks place sole consideration on a candidate’s positions on social welfare policy, immigration, capital punishment, health care, gun control and similar issues.
On the other hand, the charge continues, they ignore the nominee’s position on abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage and euthanasia. The servings they accept are those that are open to “prudential judgement” (and thus optional) while they reject those that are absolute (and thus obligatory).
There is some merit to the charge. Many Catholics in the US do tend to emphasise the social justice aspects of moral teaching while diminishing or even denying the “life” and personal behaviour teachings that are usually less open to good-faith disagreement or dissent. They do, indeed, consume exclusively from the Left end of the buffet, ignoring the nutritious offerings from the Right. And, of course, that leads to a malnourished faith.
Having said that, however, US Catholics on the Right also have exclusively discriminatory palates that are no less vulnerable to similar criticism. They take a double helping of opposition to abortion, a large spoonful of disapproval of same-sex marriage, and a heaping slice of condemnation of contraception. But, like their brothers and sisters from the other end of the buffet, they decline to consume a balanced diet of the Catholic moral life, therefore stunting their moral and spiritual growth. They reduce “prudential” policy questions to “unimportant” ones, and thus ignore them.
Common to the respective exclusionary diets on both ends of the buffet is a precise correspondence with the extreme menus of the two American political parties. Put another way, the political diets we American Catholics consume are not selected from the fulness of the Catholic menu, but rather the selective menu of the Left and Right wings of American partisan politics. When we do this, we not only starve ourselves of the goodness of faith, but we render ourselves helpless to feed those around us.
Photo: Former President Donald Trump speaks at his caucus night event at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines, Iowa, 15 January 2024 . Iowans voted in the state’s caucuses for the first contest in the 2024 Republican presidential nominating process. Trump was projected winner of the Iowa Caucus, a result that was confirmed. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)
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