Catholics, Politics, and Party Spirit

Catholics, if authentically holding fast to the faith, cannot uncritically accept the platforms of either major party in US politics today. If they are members of one of the major parties, they ought to serve as critical voices within the party calling for a truly pro-life, pro-common good politics. Excerpts:

...Predictably, after this year’s election, there have been articles suggesting that the bishops change their political “strategies.” It strikes me when I read these articles that there is a tendency to speaks about the bishops as if they were any other organization, following the same rules and strategies as the rest of the world.

What many people do not seem to get is that the Church does not choose what to speak out about based on data and political polls. We are not in a popularity contest. If we were, we would be losing badly, even among our own.


Right now, the Church is vilified in the Western world as the big bad conservative monster under the bed that wants to tell people who they should have sex with and when they should have babies. People, including many Catholics, want to put our bishops in a box with other conservative politicians and dismiss them as out of touch, white males obsessed with power.

But I just want to point out that our big bad conservative bishops just unanimously promoted the sainthood cause of a self proclaimed Christian anarchist, Dorothy Day, known for her tireless work for social justice and founding the Catholic Worker Movement...

Yes, we Catholics like to confound the world.

We are a Church that is seemingly backwards thinking on social issues and far too forward thinking on issues of justice. We are seen as conservative fuddy-duddies on the one hand and are accused of being Marxist radicals on the other. There is no box you can put Catholic teaching in. As much as people try to wedge us in with the Republicans (or the Marxists), we aren’t going to be wearing elephant or hammer and sickle pins anytime soon.

As Catholics, we cast our votes but (hopefully) our votes don’t cast us.

We are a faith of paradox because the Gospel is a paradox. I know a man who converted from Hinduism who told me that after reading the Gospels he thought, “This is so crazy, humans could not have made this up.”

It’s true, we have not made this up. The Holy Spirit has entrusted these truths to us as a Church...