How to be Wrong
Alternatively: how to vote if you're Catholic but also a huge idiot (2024 edition)
“Beat yo ass and hide the Bible if God watchin”
-Saint Gregory of Nazianzus
On May 1, 2004, Colorado Springs bishop Michael Sheridan informed the members of his diocese that they would be excommunicated if they voted the wrong way in the upcoming election. If a Catholic cast a vote for any candidate who “promoted abortion” or who “promoted so-called same-sex marriage”, they would “place themselves outside the full communion of the church and may not receive Holy Communion until they have recanted their positions and been reconciled by the Sacrament of Penance,” because they would be “mak[ing] a mockery of that faith [which] belies his identity as a Catholic.” There were no extenuating circumstances, no context that could deliver any other result. Do not even think of bringing up war, torture, capital punishment, immigration enforcement. Abortion and gay marriage are evil, so evil that doing them is a mortal sin, so evil that being a politician who supports policies conducive to those actions is a mortal sin, so evil that even voting for one of those politicians was a mortal sin. There was a rule, the rule was the same every time, and breaking the rule was a mortal sin, every time.
Sheridan was the first, but not only, bishop to take a confrontational stance like this for the 2004 election. I was in a Jesuit high school and very serious about my Catholic faith when all of this happened. I had recalibrated my college plans within the past year so I could attend a Catholic university and study theology. Catholicism, and learning about Catholicism, was a huge part of my life when Sheridan and other bishops were saying these things. And I remember thinking at the time “well saying that seems really stupid and wrong”. I thought that because of my own personal political beliefs. As it turns out, I was right. But I didn't know why I was right.
Twenty years later, here’s another guy who’s wrong:
Frank Pavone, pictured above wearing a standard black button-up shirt that any person can buy and wear whenever they want - put a pin in that - is the head of the political advocacy group Priests For Life - put a pin in that, too - and is an outspoken supporter and Catholic advisor for Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, as well as Trump's 2020 and 2016 campaigns. During the 2016 campaign, he infamously used a fetus as a political prop during a Facebook livestream from the sanctuary of the church, during which he told his fans:
“Today I am showing [this fetus] to you because in this election we have to decide if we will allow this child killing to continue in America or not. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic platform says yes, let the child-killing continue (and you pay for it); Donald Trump and the Republican platform says no, the child should be protected.”
That's the ballgame, folks, this election is about whether or not we're okay with child killing, and everything else is negotiable. And, I've talked about this before, but look: if you think that abortion is always direct intentional murder of children happening on a scale that eclipses the Holocaust, then yes, that is where you logically progress, the entirety of your political engagement will absolutely be built around trying to stop the worst ongoing mass killing in the history of humanity. How could you possibly care about anything else? If I'm to take Pavone at his word on everything he says about abortion, then yes, his way of engaging with politics is the only logical and internally consistent response to the reality he describes. It certainly explains why he then supported Trump's re-election campaign in 2020, going so far as to deliver this prayer at a December 2020 Stop the Steal rally:
“Oh God, we praise your loving providence, by which you have always protected your people in distress. We thank you for the United States of America, which you have preserved through many trials and have blessed with the greatest president we've had, Donald J. Trump. Time and time again, you've given him victory over his enemies, who are absolutely certain he could not ever win, who spied on his campaign, misused federal intelligence agencies against him, fabricated lies about him, launched fake investigations and impeachment proceedings, and undermined the integrity of our elections. Lord, you have given President Trump victory over all these enemies, and we ask you to give him and us victory once again."
Again, this all seems to follow from Pavone's stance. If this is the guy you need to stop the murder of millions, then yeah, you need to do whatever it takes, take on divine assistance if possible, even if the election has already been called, to make sure this guy stays in office. He's the greatest president we've ever had! He’s the one who has delivered victory over our enemies! Nothing else matters! Who cares about democracy! Millions of lives are at stake!
You all know what happened with the election, and, if you’re the kind of person that reads Catholic blogs, you probably also know what happened to Frank Pavone. He’s not a priest anymore. He’s the head of Priests for Life, but the Vatican laicized him in late 2022 for “blasphemous communications on social media”. The Vatican told Pavone “you need to stop posting, or you are going to stop being a priest,” and Pavone said “I would like to keep posting, please.” A man so repellent that even noted shitheel Timothy Dolan was like “I can’t deal with this guy anymore” lost the job that he had for decades, a job that he believed he was divinely called to perform, because he staked everything on Donald Trump.
But Pavone is still grinding as an enthusiastic lay supporter of Trump in 2024. How could he not be? There are still millions of lives at stake, and Trump is going to be the champion of the unborn. A second Trump term is the best chance we have to aggressively pursue policies that will ban abortions nationwide, right? That’s what Trump has made the centerpiece of his campaign, right?
Ah, you all know what happened here, too. Because abortion bans post-Dobbs have become just absolute electoral poison, because the backlash to Dobbs could still end up deciding the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump is in a very awkward spot where he has to campaign on “okay, well clearly we all know that some abortion is okay”. I suppose if I wanted to be really on-the-nose about it, I’d find a swing-state mailer like the Georgia one below which literally has a photograph of Donald Trump smiling and giving a thumbs up next to the giant words “COMMON SENSE ABORTION”:
I don’t know how voters will receive this message, I don’t know how they will prioritize this issue when there are so many issues to prioritize as well, I don’t know how the votes will break down in the swing states. But I do think it is very funny to imagine Frank Pavone, who has dedicated his life and his vocation for the past decade to this man to the extent that he’s no longer a priest because of Donald Trump, receiving this mailer and wondering if Donald Trump, who has invariably fucked over ever single person he has ever had the chance to fuck over his entire life, might have just fucked him over.
I guess if we wanted to see what Pavone thought about all of this, we could just read what he wrote on the Priests for Life - I suppose it’s now an implied “Priests for Life and Also This Guy” - website on April 18, 2024, two decades after arguments over absolute non-negotiable moral evils. Pavone's piece is very long and meandering but about halfway through we get to my absolute favorite sentence:
“Jesus Christ taught his disciples to be realists.”
Hell yes. HELL YES! LET’S DO IT!
“Understand the big picture. [Trump’s] whole campaign is about saving our nation. The Democrat Party is trying to destroy it, trying to overrun it with Marxism, trying to concentrate all power within a one-party rule that cares nothing about human life, the nuclear family, faith, or freedom. As I pointed out in Part 2 of this article, President Trump is fighting to preserve the very tools we need to abolish abortion: free speech, free and fair elections, freedom of religion, etc. He is trying to end the deep state and stop the weaponization of government, which is trying to shut down and imprison the pro-life movement. So whether you agree with his reasoning or not, try to understand his reasoning: ‘None of the policy goals we have can be achieved if the country itself doesn’t survive. We can save the country, but to do that we have to win this year’s elections. To get elected we have to counteract the Democrats’ fear-mongering talking points. One of those is that Republicans will ban abortion altogether – a position which most Americans currently reject. Therefore, I will make it clear that electing me (and Republicans generally) does not mean an immediate nationwide ban on abortion.’ Newsweek’s Senior Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, who is strongly against abortion, makes similar observations about the way President Trump is handling the abortion situation. This is not the end justifying the means. It’s simply an admission of the limitation of the means. I am not doing evil; I’m simply recognizing the limits of my ability to do good…The abortion tyrants in the Democrat Party hate America, hate the unborn, and hate us. President Trump leads the way in pointing that out and being ready to root out that enemy. And if our support of him is based on nothing else, let it be that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” [Emphasis Pavone’s]
Yes, we did stake everything on a guy who is now distancing himself from our position, but…come on, you don't want the OTHER guys to win, right? Now, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” may not strike you as scriptural teaching, because it’s not, but it’s all Pavone has left as the bedrock for why his political engagement is what it is. Pavone’s wrong. He’s wrong because he put all of his trust in a guy that any rational observer could have told you was unlikely to deliver against that trust. He’s wrong because he's had to embrace the rationalizations that he had previously and forcefully denounced. He’s wrong because he’s been telling you for multiple election cycles that he’s acting based on the unshakeable teachings of the church, when it’s become clear this cycle that he’s just doing what he wants and scrambling to find a way to justify it. He’s wrong because his bosses in the church told him he was wrong and he kept doing it anyways and he lost his job. What if there’s another reason he’s wrong?
Let's go back and look at another document from the 2004 election: this one is called “Voter Guide for Serious Catholics”1, and was put out by the media organization Catholic Answers (CA). It was probably the most infamous thing CA ever put out until, well, earlier this year when they soft-launched an AI Pixar priest that said you could baptize people with Gatorade2. The document communicates a lot of the same messages that we saw from bishops like Sheridan: there are “non-negotiable” issues that Catholics cannot in any way support with their vote, without committing a serious sin. Those issues, as articulated by CA in 2004, were abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, and gay marriage. There’s no negotiation on those, your vote has to be based on those issues, and a vote for a candidate that supported positive policies for any or all of those issues was insufficiently Catholic and could potentially place you outside of the communion of the church.
Seems kind of harsh, right? But, if that’s the teaching of the church, that’s the teaching of the church. CA isn’t actually an official church organization, they’re a group that wrote a pamphlet just as easily as you or I could write a pamphlet, but I guess I trust them. Still, I have some vague recollection about Catholic teaching on “conscience”? Like, I’m supposed to think about moral decisions before I make them, rather than blindly trusting whatever someone else tells me? Ah, I see, that’s in this document as well, in the 146-word section titled “The Role of Your Conscience”:
“Conscience is like an alarm. It warns you when you are about to do something that you know is wrong. It does not itself determine what is right or wrong. For your conscience to work properly, it must be properly informed—that is, you must inform yourself about what is right and what is wrong. Only then will your conscience be a trusted guide. Unfortunately, today many Catholics have not formed their consciences adequately regarding key moral issues. The result is that their consciences do not "sound off" at appropriate times, including on Election Day. A well-formed conscience will never contradict Catholic moral teaching. For that reason, if you are unsure where your conscience is leading you when at the ballot box, place your trust in the unwavering moral teachings of the Church. (The Catechism of the Catholic Church is an excellent source of authentic moral teaching.)”
Okay, that’s interesting, so conscience only tells me when I’m doing something wrong, not what right or wrong is, okay that’s fine, I appreciate you passing along the official church teaching on conscience. But, just to be absolutely sure, and because you pointed to the Catechism as an excellent source of authentic moral teaching, and because I happen to have my copy of the Catechism right here, I’m just going to open it, look up the church teaching on conscience starting in paragraph 1,776, and grab about the same amount of words that CA used to find the actual church teaching on conscience:
“It is important for every person to be sufficiently present to himself in order to hear and follow the voice of his conscience…Conscience includes the perception of the principles of morality; their application in the given circumstances by practical discernment of reasons and goods; and finally judgment about concrete acts yet to be performed or already performed. The truth about the moral good, stated in the law of reason, is recognized practically and concretely by the prudent judgment of conscience…Conscience enables one to assume responsibility for the acts performed…Man is sometimes confronted by situations that make moral judgments less assured and decision difficult. But he must always seriously seek what is right and good and discern the will of God expressed in divine law. To this purpose, man strives to interpret the data of experience and the signs of the times assisted by the virtue of prudence, by the advice of competent people, and by the help of the Holy Spirit and His gifts.”
Hey wait a second. This says I’m supposed to seriously think about things and judge prudently and listen to myself and see what other data and people say and look at what’s happening in the world around this decision and take responsibility for my actions, and it definitely doesn’t say “well if you’re not sure, ignore your conscience and vote how we tell you.”
When CA put this out in 2004, again, good-Catholic-me was like “well that seems really stupid and wrong”. I thought that because it seemed to me that CA was just saying stuff so they could tell Catholics that they had to vote Republican in what promised to be a close election. I thought it was stupid and wrong because of my personal political preferences. But it was stupid and wrong for another reason: because it was objectively wrong. It presented something as church teaching which wasn’t church teaching, and you can tell because you can just look at the church teaching document that they cited and see that it’s a different message than what CA was telling you. And that, in turn, may lead you to look at a few other church teaching documents to see just how shaky CA’s argument really is. For example, “non-negotiable evil” is not an actual theological term; the closest you can find in magisterial teaching documents would be “intrinsic evils”, and you can find a very interesting list of them in John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, paragraph 80, which in turn pulls from Gaudium et Spes:
“Consequently, without in the least denying the influence on morality exercised by circumstances and especially by intentions, the Church teaches that "there exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object". The Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of such acts: "Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator."
Sure, abortion, euthanasia, that seems to align with what CA put out. But torture is in there too, and that was a pretty salient political issue in 2004 (the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April of that year), but discussing torture as an intrinsic evil might have hurt George W. Bush’s reelection chances, so CA just kind of ignored it (so did Sheridan). Deportation is on there, too - with no suggestion that it's less evil than anything else on that list - and that sure feels like a more salient issue in 2024 than, say, human cloning, and it sure seems like one party is working very hard to position themselves as the “pro-this-intrinsic-evil” party, perhaps far more than they are an “anti-different-intrinsic-evil” party. There's nothing in here that tells me I need to vote for Republicans and against Democrats in order to remain in a state of grace; based on the stuff towards the end of that passage, I feel like my main political obligation as a Catholic now is to build the Glorious International Workers Republic. But on top of all of that - literally! Above it in the passage! - Pope John Paul II, who we all know was a giant hippie and Communist agitator, outright acknowledges the influence of circumstances and intention on moral culpability. In any moral decision, you don’t get a list of “non-negotiable” boxes that you have to tick. You have to actually think and check. You have to say “what is going on here, what is going to work, what has happened in the past”, you know, basic things that we associate with processing reality.
So: CA, Sheridan, Pavone, what if they’re wrong because they’re objectively wrong? What if I know that they’re wrong not because I have different political views, but because I looked it up? And it didn’t even take me very long to look up, and anyone else can just look it up too if they’re not sure? What does that mean for the way we should look at Catholicism?
In 2020, in my G.O.T.H.S. 1.0 era, I wrote a big long essay on Alan Keyes (in the photo above, Keyes is on the right), whom I picked as a subject because he had a very entertaining political history. He holds very unshakeable and very sincere anti-abortion beliefs, but for decades he has been completely unable to sell himself as a candidate for Senator (1988, 1992, 1996, 2004; Keyes set the national record for the largest margin of loss in a Senate election in two of those) or President (2000, 2008), and he ending up spending the COVID pandemic selling bleach out of the back of an airboat. That’s a funny story and it was fun to write about. As I was researching it, though, I learned about Keyes’ role in implementing the “Mexico City Policy”, an executive branch policy that Republican presidents from Reagan up through Trump implement in order to cut off foreign aid to healthcare NGOs that refer patients to abortion providers. Obviously, cutting off funding to healthcare NGOs has adverse effects on healthcare outcomes in these less developed countries, but the bishops still love the policy because, hey, you've got to stop abortion, whatever the other costs.
I guess the only assumption there is that the Mexico City Policy actually does stop abortion, and as I was writing the piece almost five years ago, it occurred to me that I actually didn’t know if it did do that, and I wanted to see if there was a way to check. Not only was there a way to check, but public health researchers had done all of that work for me already, and there were three peer-reviewed studies in The Lancet (2019), the New England Journal of Medicine (2017), and the Bulletin of the WHO (2011), and they all said the same thing, after doing actual studies and checking with other scientists: it doesn’t work. Abortions go up worldwide when the Mexico City Policy is in effect, because the Mexico City Policy is in effect. The bishops and media outlets like CA and idiots like Pavone will tell you that we need to support the party that is going to fight abortion with policies like this one, but this policy doesn’t do what they say it’s doing, and I know that because I looked it up. As I put it in the original essay, using a less polished tone than the sober voice of reason that you've come to expect in 2024-era G.O.T.H.S.:
“I'm not a doctor, I've never done research in medical journals, and finding all of these papers took me about thirty minutes total [they also didn’t require me to pay any money to access]. It is not hard to answer the question “does the Mexico City Policy work at reducing abortion?” objectively, with a loud “shit no”. Maybe the bishops in 2007 get graded on a curve because there wasn’t as much published research back then, but they don’t get a pass for praising the policy in 2017, as piece after piece came out - they’re still coming out! - on this policy and how it has failed at all of its stated objectives. There is no reason, outside of partisan shittiness, for the Catholic hierarchy to support this policy, to ignore peer-reviewed medical journals, articles written by real-life doctors and scientists, in favor of some shit that a bleach salesman with a cathedral-length train of political failures behind him happened to crap out in the Reagan years.”
If someone tells you that your political engagement as a Catholic is required to be a certain way because of church teaching, you’re allowed to look it up and see if what they’re advocating for actually works. You’re allowed to check and see if they’re wrong.
In 2022 - which I guess I’d call the G.O.T.H.S. 3.0 era? - I wrote a piece about Los Angeles archbishop Jose Gomez, and his infamous 2021 speech denouncing the Black Lives Matter protests. It was such a bleak example of how our church chose to engage with pressing moral and political issues in America, and it was the sort of thing that made Catholics like me seriously re-think our place in the church, if our church taught that participating in mass direct actions like these was sinful.
Except, of course, that our church doesn’t teach that. Gomez is wrong, not just wrong because I don’t like him, not just wrong because I have a different political orientation that he does, but objectively wrong. Again, I looked it up. In that particular essay, I compared Gomez’s address to Saint Oscar Romero’s four pastoral letters from the late 1970s, also delivered at a time of violent political crisis that demanded mass direct action in response., and Romero had very different things to say about direct mass action than Gomez did. Again, Gomez wasn’t just wrong because I found another bishop that I liked better; there was also an important rhetorical difference between the two. Romero showed his work. He went through conciliar documents, bishops conference documents, apostolic letters, to buttress all of his arguments, and he cited them all extensively. Held up next to that work, Gomez looks like a fool (mainly because he is a fool) when he talks about history, or inequality, or the role of the church in the world. This was how I put it in the original essay:
“In other words, when Romero writes, he does his homework, and he takes great pains to show that what he's teaching is in continuity with the overall teachings of the church. Gomez is working in a different and less formal medium, and I don't know if it's fair to expect him to refer back to formal church teaching as often as Romero does. But I kind of expect him to do it at least occasionally: he is still speaking for the church, with the teaching authority of the church, in another time of political strife, on the same topic that Romero tackled: the relationship of the church to social movements and direct mass action. When Romero talks about it, he comes across as someone who has done a lot of thinking and research before writing down his thoughts. When Gomez talks about it, he sounds like he's talking out of his ass.”
If someone tells you that your political engagement as a Catholic is required to be a certain way because of church teaching, you’re allowed to look it up and see if the church teaching is what they actually say it is. You’re allowed to check and see if they’re wrong.
Two months ago, I wrote five essays about a court case in Michigan3, in which a Catholic therapist was suing the state to overturn a ban on conversion therapy for minors. It was really important to me, as I was writing those essays, that I be right, as right as I possibly could be. I wanted to say that this lawsuit was wrong, not just wrong because I personally disagreed with it, not just wrong because I held different political views than the plaintiff, but wrong in objective and documented ways. Conversion therapy is harmful to minors and increases risk of suicide in queer youth, and the medical community has been saying that for decades. According to church teaching as articulated in conciliar documents, Catholics cannot just summarily reject the existing science and research when making moral decisions. The legal arguments the plaintiffs are pursuing had already been rejected in a federal appeals court eleven years ago. The people funding the lawsuit have been pretty open that they’re just trying to get cases like these in front of a more favorable judiciary as part of a project to dismantle the administrative state. Every source was linked if readers wanted to look for themselves. People were doing something big in the name of their Catholic faith, and you could go and evaluate for yourself if they were doing the right thing, using a wide array of available information. The series ended here:
“If you get frustrated by Catholic leaders and organizations acting like this, you may be tempted to think “well, they've got the pointy hats and I'm Just Some Guy, maybe I'm wrong”. They actually may be wrong, and not just “they chose to emphasize a different verse in the Bible than I did” wrong, but “on paper, peer reviewed studies, conciliar documents, existing case law, each piece of it available online for free in ten seconds” wrong. You, believe it or not, just may be right. And you definitely are not alone.”
If someone tells you that your political engagement as a Catholic is required to be a certain way because of church teaching, you’re allowed to look it up and see what the hell is actually going on and what happened the last time they tried this. You’re allowed to check and see if they’re wrong.
This is not because I’m a “different kind” of Catholic. I am not a “Pope Francis” or “social justice” or “Matthew 25” or “Gospel values” or “encounter” or “pastoral” Catholic. I am not a “bad” Catholic, I am not a “guy who hears church teaching but takes a step back and maybe does something different because I’m a little different in how I look at things so maybe I’m not a strict” Catholic. I'm just Catholic. Now, I am also just some idiot on the computer, but I can look stuff up, I can judge sources for reliability, and I can find the resources to help me figure out what’s right and what’s wrong. And that looks so rudimentary when I write it out, but the bishops do not do this. Priests with YouTube accounts do not do this. Nobody who writes a “voter guide for serious Catholics” does this. I’ll tell you who does it: Kathleen Sprows Cummings and Natalia Imperatori-Lee do it when they talk about patriarchal power in the church. Kaya Oakes does it when she writes about the abuse crisis and the historical treatment of women or queer people in the church. Susan Bigelow Reynolds does it when she talks about the power that lay Catholics can build separate from the hierarchy. Mollie O’Reilly does it when she writes about abortion policy. Daniel Walden or Therese Lysaught do it when they write about the medical and social realities facing queer and trans Catholics. These are writers that I admire greatly and try to emulate in my own stupid way, because they look stuff up and show their work and that means that when they say something, they’re right. They are not a “different kind” of Catholic that stands apart from the “default” mode of Catholicism where you hear someone else tell you that something is doctrine and just kind of go with it. They are being Catholic the only way that you can be Catholic, where, according to the Catechism, you “seriously seek what is right and good…[and strive] to interpret the data of experience and the signs of the times assisted by the virtue of prudence, by the advice of competent people, and by the help of the Holy Spirit and His gifts.”
In late September of this year, Fr. Dennis Holtschneider, a Vincentian priest who was the president of DePaul University for fourteen years, gave a lecture at Chicago Theological Union on the steps he took to try and make DePaul a welcoming environment for LGBTQ+ students, staff, and faculty, which was, obviously, a high-wire act for the president of a prominent Catholic university, but he worked hard to do right by a marginalized population. CTU hasn’t posted that talk anywhere yet, but I was in the audience and you just have to trust me that it was a nice talk. But the part I really want to talk about was the response from Loyola University bioethics professor Therese Lysaught, whom I just cited one paragraph ago as someone whose approach to Catholicism I really like4. If I could paste her entire speech here, I would, but look at what she said near the beginning of her talk:
“One will often hear discernment around such details framed as “pastoral.” Such claims presume a distinction between “doctrine” and “pastoral application,” with the presumption that “pastoral” means making an exception or an accommodation or something that somehow falls short. I would suggest, however, that the distinction between “doctrine” and “pastoral application” is false and quite problematic, and for at least two reasons. First, doctrine is necessarily embodied in practice. What we do, what we live, is what we believe. If we “believe” one thing and do another, we’re either inconsistent, hypocritical, confused, all of the above, or something worse.”
“Pastoral” Catholicism, Catholicism where you look stuff up and think about how your actions might affect others in the world, is not a “different” kind of Catholicism, it is not a “looser” kind of Catholicism, it is not something that should ever be distinct from “doctrinal” or “default” Catholicism. It is Catholicism. Lysaught would go on to cite Ad Theologiam Promovendam, and speak to how important it is that theology be, in Pope Francis’ words, “ecclesiological, contextual, synodal, transdisciplinary, sacramental, and integrating love and truth”; in other words, something where you might have to look stuff up, or talk to other people to see how they will be affected. And she concluded by citing a parable that she’s cited before: Jesus healing a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath, in Mark’s Gospel:
““BUT, Fr. Holtschneider,” we can hear the rejoinder, “it’s the MORAL LAW!” So how do we think about the relationship between our theology/church teaching and our laws—policies within our institutions as well as the relationship between church teaching and civil law…it’s not that [Jesus] doesn’t care about the [Sabbath] law. Rather, he’s saying “we’ve gotten it backwards”; “we’ve turned it inside out.” People have become secondary to the law, rather than the law existing to serve people, to promote their full flourishing. Once we get it backwards, the law becomes an idol. Augustine—esteemed theologian—reminds us that in sinning, we don’t pursue evils; we pursue good things that God has made. Sin occurs when we pursue a good thing “out of order,” as more important than God and human persons. This is what’s going on in that synagogue. Jesus wants to get the order back in place, so that the law serves the flourishing of persons. Jesus heals the man. And what do the religious authorities do? They “went out and at once began to plot against him, discussing how to destroy him” (Mark 3: 1-6). Then, as now, when law becomes an idol, the result is violence—either the violence of vitriolic rhetoric, the violence of exclusion, the violence of physical harm to people, or the violence of enacting draconian civil laws.”
Sheridan and Pavone and CA talk about the importance of their laws, their rules, quite a bit. That’s what being Catholic is, you have to do this because you signed up for these rules, they’ll argue, and yeah, it looks like the rules are leading us somewhere incredibly bad, but these are the rules that come with being Catholic. Unless, of course, Catholics sign up for a person instead of a rule, a person who recognizes and responds to suffering in front of Him, even if the rule tells Him something else.
If you’re a regular G.O.T.H.S. reader5, you might think of yourself as a “Pope Francis” or “social justice” or “Matthew 25” or “Gospel values” or “encounter” or “pastoral” Catholic. But you are not trying to find workarounds to the “real” Catholic doctrine when you do this. I hope that this very long essay helps you think of yourself as the only kind of Catholic, and I hope that if someone tells you how the “good” kind of Catholic would view this election, or some other issue of political engagement, you not only understand that they’re full of shit, but you understand that they’re wrong, wrong about how you have to vote, wrong about what is in the Catechism and in conciliar documents, wrong about what it means to be Catholic. That doesn't solve larger scale problems of political power, of course, but it does take away someone else's power to tell you what to do in the name of your faith. That's good, and it makes it easier for you, when circumstances call on you to make a moral choice, to determine the right thing, do the right thing, and know that it's the right thing. And we need to do all of that, because in Catholicism, we have enough examples of how to be wrong.
The link here is an archived version of the voter guide stored on the Priests for Life website.
A quick note on this: theologically, I'm not ready to give that statement a summary dismissal. Perhaps you actually could baptize people with Gatorade, especially if water wasn't available. But I feel pretty confident that this was not the answer CA wanted their fake computer priest to give.
I am never publishing five essays in one week again.
Hopefully, CTU will post this talk on their YouTube channel someday, but I asked Prof. Lysaught for a copy of her remarks, from which I’m pulling my quotes.
Which, demographically, means you’re also a 53-year-old white female professor in a humanities department that just got its budget cut.