Church weighs in on presidential campaign

Within days of bishops, including Washington’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl, warning that specific political decision-making should be left properly to the laity, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a flurry of statements on several different issues.

In response to Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine’s statement that he hoped the Catholic Church might change its opposition to same-sex marriage, Archbishop Allen Vigneron, who chairs the doctrine committee, and Bishop Richard Malone, who leads the committee on laity, marriage and family, issued a joint statement restating traditional teaching. “The Church’s teaching on marriage as exclusively the permanent, faithful, and fruitful union of one man and one woman cannot change,” they wrote.

“The attempt to redefine the essential meaning of marriage is acting against the Creator. It cannot be morally justified, ‘for he commanded and they were created. He established them for ever and ever; he fixed their bounds and he set a law which cannot pass away’ (Psalms 148:5-6c),” the statement added. “Therefore, as a community and a nation, we cannot make progress in human development if we ‘think that the weakening of the family as that natural society founded on marriage will prove beneficial to society as a whole’ (Amoris Laetitia, para. 52).”

Speaking on behalf on the committee on migration – a toxic issue with Republican candidate Donald Trump advocating strict controls and Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton taking a more liberal approach – Bishop Eusebio Elizondo stated: “The Catholic bishops of the United States recognise the responsibility of nations to control their borders. In addition, we will continue to underscore the right of people to migrate who are unable to find the means to support themselves and their families in their homeland, or who are fleeing persecution and violence. Sovereign nations should find a way to accommodate this right.”

Meanwhile, in a lecture at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, on 15 September, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia said: “I believe that each candidate [for president] is very bad news for our country, though in different ways. One candidate, in the view of a lot of people, is a belligerent demagogue with an impulse-control problem.  And the other, also in the view of a lot of people, is a criminal liar, uniquely rich in stale ideas and bad priorities.

“So where does that leave us?” he asked. The task of renewing society, he said, “requires a different kind of people. It demands that we be different people.” The work must begin, he said, with defending the family and the unborn child, and seeing through the “liberal democratic fantasy [of] the sovereign, self-creating self”. This contemporary fantasy, he said, “is a lie. It’s the very opposite of real Christian freedom.”