Tired of election mail? This time of year, we receive plenty of unsolicited advice. Some organizations publish voter guides, ostensibly leaving the decision to us. One branch of morality concerns our life in society, but using it to create Catholic voter guides may misunderstand both its purpose and its message. Social doctrine is for solving problems, not completing ballots.
At the center of Catholic social doctrine sits the principle of human dignity, enthroned there by God when he made us in his image. Three other principles stand guard around it: the common good, subsidiarity and solidarity. The 2004 “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church” calls these four “permanent principles.” From them, the lights of reason and faith shine in every direction through all parts of society, especially the family, work, economic life and the political community.
Social doctrine cannot be hot-wired into an algorithm so that we can input the positions of the candidates for an office and expect a recommendation for our vote. Since candidates are likely to hold a few but not all parts of social doctrine, the algorithms’ creators must weigh some parts more than others in order to provide clear output. However well-reasoned the weighting system, the Church itself hardly does this, so inevitably the publishers of Catholic voter guides tend to their own partisan preferences.
Voter guides often sidestep the four permanent principles in favor of listing particular Catholic positions, whether real or alleged. The Church teaches social doctrine because it flows from the Christian understanding of humanity. The application of this doctrine to real-world problems is particularly the work of the laity. In the encyclical “Centesimus annus,” Pope Saint John Paul II explains the two-step process: “The Church, in fact, has something to say about specific human situations, individual, and communal, national and international. She formulates a genuine doctrine for these situations, a corpus which enables her to analyze social realities, to make judgments about them and to indicate directions to be taken for the just resolution of the problems involved.” (no. 5)
Dr. Kenneth Craycraft, a theologian and attorney who recently spoke in our Diocese, offers an example of using social doctrine to solve a social problem. He and a few others across the political spectrum advocate a “shared cost of birth,” a federal program to reduce or eliminate the costs of birth. The proposal defends human dignity by a call to solidarity: encourage parents to choose life by eliminating the cost barrier through the federal subsidy. He calls this “thinking outside the two-chambered box” of the major political parties.
Catholic voter guides can also give the impression that voting alone fulfills our political and civic obligations or that elections alone can solve social problems. “Rerum novarum,” considered the beginning of modern social doctrine, has been hailed even by non-Catholics. It was much more than Pope Pius XII’s voter guide for the Italian election of 1890. (Anyway, it was published six months after that election!) Instead, the Church calls citizens to participate in the civil community in a variety of ways.
Voting is just one form of participation in democratic societies. The Church defines participation broadly as “a series of activities by means of which the citizen, either as an individual or in association with others, whether directly or through representation, contributes to the cultural, economic, political and social life of the civil community to which he belongs.” (CSDC no. 189)
Oftentimes a more potent form of participation is membership in the “intermediate groups” that stand between the individual and the government. These are the civic associations, professional associations, labor unions and more that form civil society. If my only membership is a political party, or if my only political activity is a candidate’s campaign, I can be tempted by “political messianism,” the idea that a candidate or party has all the solutions to social problems. On the other hand, active participation in intermediate groups engages my knowledge and experience more deeply, allowing opportunities for creativity and positively shaping my character – even if the work itself does not fix all of the targeted problems.
During my pastorate in Atlantic City, the parish worked with cultural associations to organize celebrations of national patrons like Our Lady of Guadalupe (Mexico), El Señor de los Milagros (Peru) and Our Lady of Altagracia (the Dominican Republic). We offered a Mass of Solidarity with Working Families and marched with members of Unite Here Local 54 behind a manner of Saint Joseph the Worker. We hosted one of the city’s neighborhood associations, and the parish sponsored a table at luncheons of the Metropolitan Business & Citizens Association.
Catholic social doctrine provides an “original perspective” of life in society. (CSDC no. 522) It would be a shame to shoehorn this perspective into the partisan politics of the day.
Father Jon Thomas is pastor of Christ the King Parish, Haddonfield, and chaplain for New Jersey AFL-CIO.
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