24th Sunday after Pentecost
Today’s holy Gospel portrays Our Blessed Lord sleeping in the boat while the disciples are about to be immersed in the waves. He seems indifferent to their plight, but in reality He is testing their confidence. This is evident from the words He addresses to them when they wake Him: Why are you fearful, O ye of little faith? (Mt 8:26). Often in our lives we are put into situations in which we feel we are lost. We are going down fast and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Then we must reach out to the Lord, without doubting. He knows all things, He can do all things, and He loves us. What more do we need to know?
Our Lord may seem to be asleep today. The Church and the world both seem to be going from bad to worse. There is little good and lots of bad news. He seems to sleep, but He is testing our patience and our confidence. He expects us to never doubt for a second that He has all things in hand. But that does not mean, of course, that we sit back and do nothing. It’s one of the marks of true saints that they pray as if everything depended on God but they act as if everything depended on them.
Not infrequently we run across people who are so appalled by the state of the world and the Church that they truly believe only some extraordinary divine intervention can set the record straight. There is certainly something to be said for this, and there is no shortage of catastrophic events that could possibly happen to wake the world up, at least for those who are not so hardened to grace that they would see the divine hand in some terrible chastisement. The Apocalypse tells us however that in the end times, many will blaspheme all the more when God begins to chastise. And men were scorched with great heat, and they blasphemed the name of God, who hath power over these plagues, neither did they penance to give Him glory (Ap 16:9). Great chastisements are not always the fix, even though they are certainly part of God’s plan and they will come in their time.
This being said, whatever the future may hold, it has never been a Catholic attitude to sit back and wait and in the meantime consider that nothing we can do really matters, or on the contrary to think we can do whatever we want to fix the situation. The first is a defeatist mentality that accomplishes nothing. The second is playing God by taking the law into our own hands. In the Church at the moment, many are tempted to either throw in the towel and give in to despondency, or to jump ship and pretend anything goes.
On the political scene as well. This week, the eyes of the world will be turned to the US elections. While many may detest America, I don’t think anyone honestly thinks that US elections are not important. US politics matters because they very much influence the rest of the world. Of late, a number of voices have made themselves heard questioning whether or not Catholics can cast a vote in favour of a candidate whose pro-life stance is not impeccable. To them, unless the candidate promotes Catholic morality in its fulness, you can’t vote for him. That means, of course, that there is no one to vote for. It means that good Catholics would have no say at all in who is elected.
The principle is erroneous, and if I deal with this here it is not to engage in politics but to enlighten both American listeners or readers and ourselves for when we have our Australian elections next year. It is true that a Catholic voter must vote for a candidate who upholds the moral law in its integrity if there is one. If such a candidate is not eligible, either because he is not on the ticket or has no chance of getting elected, then it is permissible to vote for the lesser evil. It could possibly be a requirement to do so, if the greater evil represented a much greater harm to a nation and its citizens.
Furthermore, in our so-called democratic societies, to cast one’s vote for a candidate is not to endorse everything he/she stands for. Much less is it to give approval to whatever they will actually do while in office if they are elected. There are rarely ideal candidates for any of the important offices in our modern day governments, and we must make choices based on criteria of both faith and reason, and often it is a matter of limiting the damage. That is the way things work. We elect officials and we make known to them what we reject in their policies, and we urge them to clean up their game. It’s an ongoing process, inherent in a democratic society.
There is a hierarchy of values that a Catholic voter must consider when it comes to public morality. At the very top is life itself. This is why the right to life of the unborn or otherwise vulnerable is the top moral issue in any election today, and it takes precedence over any other. Flannery O’Connor wrote in 1955: “You can’t be any poorer than dead!” All the aborted babies in the world are the poorest of all, because they are deprived of the most fundamental right. So to stand for the poor and to promote abortion is to lie to the world. This is why the Pope’s recently remark about one US candidate throwing out babies and the other throwing out immigrants is, at the very best, unhelpful, for it blurs a fundamental distinction between the inalienable right of a conceived child to be born, with the relative right of a person to seek asylum in another country. We can talk forever and debate unendingly about how to best provide for the needs of anyone seeking asylum in a given country; we cannot talk about whether we will kill babies. There is no proportion between the two and to pretend there is simply to be lying to the world, or to have lost all sense of priorities.
So where does that leave US Catholic voters? One point is clear: if there is a candidate who aggressively promotes the right to abortion in all cases (there is), while another candidate wants to limit such a right to rare cases (there is), it would be clearly sinful to vote for the first. Any Catholic who does so would be well advised to go straight from the voting box to the confessional, and hope that in between the two they will develop true contrition. One prominent American bishop said as much some years ago: “I will not vote for any politician who will promote abortion or the culture of death, no matter how appealing the rest of his or her program might be. They are wolves in sheep’s garments, the K.K.K. without the sheets, and sadly enough, they don’t even know it. If I were ever tempted to vote for simply selfish reasons, tribal allegiances, or economic advantages, rather than on the moral direction of the country, I should beat a hasty retreat from the curtain of the polling booth to the curtain of the confessional”(Cardinal Sean O’Malley).
In summary, to vote for a candidate who promotes abortion is sinful. To vote for a candidate who allows for abortion in certain cases is not sinful if there is no other viable candidate, for in that case we are acting to avoid a greater evil. Indeed, appealing to the laws of prudence, one may possibly be obligated to so vote in order to avoid a worse outcome than if we refrained from voting.
A final word. It is the duty of the Catholic laity to make every effort to establish a political party with an impeccable record on all moral issues. If such a party becomes a major contender, things will be different. In the meantime, even if our heads should be in Heaven, we need to keep our feet squarely on the earth, and not allow the conspiracy of evil to claim even more innocent lives. We may be asked to give an account for our lethargy. May the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Virgin Most Prudent, inspire us with the right attitudes and the right decisions, and may the grace of God touch many hearts.
