You're Allowed To Ask The Bishops These Questions When They Tell You How To Vote
The hater's guide to Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship
“Clergy and lay people have complementary roles in public life. We bishops have the primary responsibility to hand on the Church's moral and social teaching. Together with priests and deacons, assisted by religious and lay leaders of the Church, we are to teach fundamental moral principles that help Catholics form their consciences correctly, to provide guidance on the moral dimensions of public decisions, and to encourage the faithful to carry out their responsibilities in political life.”
-USCCB, “Forming Consciences For Faithful Citizenship”
“Funny fact about a cage, they're never built for just one group.”
-Run the Jewels
Are you just a Republican?
I mean, it seems like you are, you call abortion an intrinsic evil, but you seem surprisingly okay with other intrinsic evils. You’re okay with the death penalty and don’t seem to feel any sense of urgency about that. You’re okay with the current Republican president who campaigned on expanding torture and is now encouraging vigilantes to execute protestors. It just seems like when Republicans do things, you like them, and when Democrats do things, you don’t, which makes you a Republican more than it does a Catholic bishop. And you’re allowed to be a Republican (I guess), but can you understand why I don’t put a lot of stock in a Republican telling me to vote Republican even if it’s against my own interests?
What have you done with your moral authority in the past?
You’re telling me your point of view matters on this because you’re part of the official teaching authority of the church and the direct successor of the Apostles. So, did you spend some of that authority willfully ignoring sexual abuse by your direct reports, like the bishop of Providence? Or did you try and restructure your diocese to shield assets from being paid to sexual abuse victims, like the bishop of New York? Do you lobby against laws that extend the statute of limitations for sexual assault so that victims cannot find justice, like the bishop of Tyler? Did you sue your state to have indoor Masses in defiance of stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of a deadly virus, like the bishop of Minneapolis? Did you try to push the LGBT students in your schools into conversion therapy, like the bishop of Indianapolis? Did you use the church's ongoing sexual abuse crisis to absolve yourself of responsibility and smear all gay people everywhere, like the late bishop of Madison? Did you just all agree to give an award to the current US Attorney General who just restarted federal executions?
And if you’re willing to do awful things like that, did you ever have any moral authority to begin with?
Who are you willing to sell out to achieve your goals?
Immigrants in concentration camps? The almost two hundred thousand preventably dead from COVID? The union workers gutted? The voters of color who have the franchise taken away from them? The millions dead from the imperial war machine? The protestors in the streets being beaten? The children marched off to schools during a deadly pandemic, in the name of “the economy”? Have you told them that their loss is worth it to you?
Is your approach actually going to work?
The president’s team can’t write a legal brief to save their lives, so the Roberts court still hasn’t overturned Roe v. Wade, as it turns out. Through multiple election cycles, Catholics have been told that they need to cast their votes a certain way so we can achieve our moral objectives, and we still haven’t achieved those moral objectives and everything else appears to have gotten way the hell worse in the meantime. Policy achievements you’ve supported have only served to increase the number of abortions globally and also drive up fun things like malnutrition and infant mortality. The people you trust to spread your message turn out to be racist and fascist and full of shit. Can you forgive me for thinking you actually don’t know the best way to accomplish your goals, and you might be terrible people to turn to for advice on how to vote?
Should I trust the Catholic church’s authority if you think it’s been infiltrated by secret gay communist Masons?
It looks like a few too many of you are reading Taylor Marshall’s shitty books, because you’re starting to share conspiracy theories openly with your parishes. If you believe that the current pope is the culmination of a decades-long conspiracy to infiltrate the Catholic church and make it gay and pagan and Communist, it means either a large chunk of you are doing the work of the devil, or (more likely) a large chunk of you are idiots who spend too much time online. So can you blame me for looking elsewhere for advice on how to vote?
What do you think happens next?
Every single person who has allied with Trump to advance their own interests has ended up humilated, shortchanged, and publicly thrown under the bus. When you participate in campaign events and let Trump declare himself “the greatest president in the history of the Catholic church”, do you think you’ll be different from all the other people he fleeced? When you honor William Barr at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, do you think he’s not going to teargas you the next time the president needs a photo op in front of a church? Do you think the man endorsed by the Klan’s newspaper in 2016 is just guaranteed to always be a friend to Catholics? Do you think his sharing Vigano’s letter, arguing that some of the bishops are trying to undermine the presidency and are enemies of the state, is generally going to work out well for the bishops? Are you telling yourself that Trump is like Constantine, and if so, did you bother to ask “hey, what happened after Constantine”? Do you think the last four years are a formula for a church that grows and thrives and helps build the kingdom here on Earth? And when you try to imagine that kingdom, how hard is it for you to tune out the cries of children in border camps and Black Americans being lynched by the state and protestors being violently suppressed by secret police and voters who are turned away because of Jim Crow laws and the thousands and thousands that are sick and dying in our country every day?
What do you think happens next? Actually, let me make the question easier: what do you think happens next, to you? The president is willing to ignore thousands of deaths a day right now, do you think he's going to drop everything and help you when you ask? The president is willing to ignore the sky when it’s on fire, do you think he’s going to listen to you once you’re done voting for him? And the president is willing to use the full violent power of the state to attack anyone who does not continually shower him with adulation, so is that going to be your plan for the next four years? And if it is, do you consider yourself a worthy successor of the original Apostles who served in the name of an executed criminal while in an occupied land?