With both the Democratic and Republican conventions behind us, the election season is in full swing. Political junkies can enjoy a veritable buffet of partisan news, gossip, polling scores, and analysis for the next two months. It behooves us as Catholics to get our conscience ready for the election. In addition to what our bishops have said about voting in Responsible Citizenship, there are also matters of concern to the universal church.

One of the concerns of Pope Francis in recent years has been protecting democracy itself. Speaking directly to the people of the United States several years ago, the Pope said, “I exhort the entire population to maintain a deep sense of responsibility and to protect the democratic values rooted in American society.” This past July in Trieste, Pope Francis spoke at length about the importance of the democratic process. He notes that in many nations there has been a decline in participation. He called on governments to “create the conditions that allow everyone to express themselves” and he called on Catholic parents to instill in their children the importance of voting. “As Catholics, we cannot be content with a marginal and private faith.”

Decades ago the idea that we in the United States should be concerned about protecting democracy would have sounded ludicrous. We stood for freedom and democracy and the communists stood for oppression and godlessness. But in the thirty years since the fall of the Iron Curtain, not only has the world changed but we have changed. New methods of teaching have exposed several generations of students to the flaws and limitations of our democratic system. The internet and cable news serve up every kind of political ideology. In the present election cycle, both the Democrats and Republicans have accused the other party of threatening democracy—and to some extent they are both right!

We have a Democratic nominee for President for whom no one voted for in a primary. We  know how that happened. After his poor performance in the debate, Democratic insiders put pressure on the President to pass the torch to Vice-President Harris. It is difficult to believe that these same insiders were unaware up to that point the President was having lapses of memory and focus. Surely democracy would have been better served if these same insiders had approached the President earlier, perhaps several years earlier. On the Republican side, the persistent claim by Mr. Trump that the 2020 election was rigged (claims not backed up by recounts, audits, or other investigations) has planted seeds of doubt about all voting and all elections and about democracy itself.  And seeing ordinary Americans charging into the Capitol to stop the electoral vote in 2021 should be enough to convince all of us that a violent takeover of our government is mot beyond the realm of possibility.

A second area that is important to the universal Catholic Church is religious liberty. In our country we usually hear this issue raised when an individual is being required to violate his or her conscience or religious beliefs, in order to comply with progressive legislation. But there is also another side to this. In the Vatican Council in the early 1960’s, the Catholic Church broke with its long-standing claim that civil government should further the aims of the Church and endorsed self-determination and religious liberty: “The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against people or any harassment of them on the basis of their race, color, condition in life or religion.”—a statement that could have been lifted from our own civil rights legislation of the 1960’s. Our U.S. Constitution forbids establishing a state religion; but it left open the right of individual states to do so. In fact, most states did have an official religion in the early days. It was not until the 1830’s that the last of the New England states stopped taxing citizens to support the Congregation Churches. Because so many of us live in fear of crime, violence, immigration, and are disoriented by the massive cultural change and the turning away from religion, there has been a rise in what is called Christian nationalism   Christian nationalists believe that the way out of the present chaos is to restore our country as a truly Christian nation with a government that enacts legislation consistent with conservative Christian values. While this may sound attractive, it would inevitably lead to various forms of discrimination. The truth is that while our Founders certainly believed in God, many of them were not Christians but Deists. They believed in a God who “wound up” the world to operate in a certain way and then let it run until it “wound down” They did not believe in a God who would send a Son into the world or intervene in our personal lives.

So, a few things to keep in mind as we all try to survive the next two months—and make it to our Italian Dinner in November.

                            Fr. Joe