Guest post by Dr. Elizabeth Groppe
In the tempest of this final week of the 2024 election, the words of St. Paul that the U.S. Catholic bishops cite in their statement Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship are sweet music to my ears:
Never let evil talk pass your lips: say only the good things men need to hear, things that
will really help them. Do nothing that will sadden the Holy Spirit with whom you were
sealed against the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, all passion and anger, harsh
words, slander, and malice of every kind. In place of these, be kind to one another,
compassionate, and mutually forgiving, just as God has forgiven you in Christ (Eph 4:29-
32).
I thank the bishops for these words and am grateful to the Catholic Moral Theology bloggers for
their reflections on the bishops’ statement. Maria Morrow offers a reflection on conscience,
prudence, and unity, and Matthew Shadle discusses the document in relation to Pope Francis’
comment about choosing the lesser evil.
Shadle explains that the bishops’ conference has issued a document prior to every
presidential election since 1976, and in a recent interview with Paul Fahey he provides an
overview of this history, noting some ways in which the content of the statement has developed
over the years in response to changes in U.S. political culture and in the U.S. Catholic Church. In
his blog, he expresses appreciation for the way in which these documents have provided
Catholics with a common language for electoral discernment. A limitation of the most recent
statement, he also observes, is “its nearly exclusive focus on the conscience of the individuavoter at the expense of encouraging Catholics to contribute to promoting the health of our
‘political ecology’ here in the United States.”
Given the current state of our political ecology and our historical context, I suggest three other ways in which this tradition of pre-election statements could be strengthened:
1) Articulation of Means of Assessment of the Character of Candidates for Public Office
Moral conscience, the Catechism states, is “present at the heart of the person” and enjoins one “to do good and to avoid evil” (no. 1777). But the exercise of conscience does not follow
automatically from birth nor even baptism. It requires, the bishops remind us, “lifelong
formation.” To this end, they recommend practices that can help us put on the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16) such as turning off the TV and spending time with Scripture and the Blessed
Sacrament, frequent prayer, and serving those in need at soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and crisis pregnancy centers (viii). At rough count, Forming Consciences includes 20 references to the formation of a Catholic conscience.
But what of the formation of the conscience of the candidates? The document does note that we must consider not only candidates’ positions on issues “but their character and integrity as well” (viii, cf. 37, 41). This essential point could be more fully developed. The character of public servants will shape the way in which they do (or don’t) execute those campaign positions they affirm that are consistent with the Catholic moral tradition, and it is also a sign of their potential openness to reasoned conversation about the positions they hold that are inconsistent with the fundamental principles of human dignity, the common good, solidarity, and subsidiarity (40–54). The character of public servants is also important in setting a tone and example for the country.
What are some criteria for discernment of the character and integrity of public servants? For
example, what can we learn from the patterns of a candidate’s public record? What virtues are in evidence? Does the candidate demonstrate humility and the capacity to learn from error and to make corrections of practices and policies as appropriate? When a fact-check shows an err, is this an indication of normal human fallibility or a lack of truthfulness? Does the candidate exercise transparency and full disclosure of personal financial interests and relationships? Is the candidate’s career record free of nepotism? Does the candidate exercise the self-promotion necessary in the life of a politician for the sake of the common good, which a noble politics promotes (63), or in the mode of narcissism? Given abundant historical evidence of the potential of power to corrupt human conscience and behavior, how has the candidate used power in the past? What are signs of the way in which the candidate will use power in the future if elected? “Authority,” the Catechism states, “does not derive its moral legitimacy from itself. It must not behave in a despotic manner, but must act for the common good as a ‘moral force based on freedom and a sense of responsibility’” (no. 1902). These are some examples of questions of character relevant to public office that could be articulated.
2) Engaging Scientific Work on the Biospheric Crisis
When the bishops published their first pre-election statement in 1976 with the title “Political
Responsibility,” the degradation of the biosphere by human action was advanced but was not as grave as it now is in 2024. We are living in the midst of what scientists term a “mass extinction event”—this one initiated by our own species, Homo sapiens. In 2009, a team of 28
internationally renowned scientists identified nine critical processes that enable human life on
Earth to flourish, and a 2023 update to the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries project at Stockholm University quantified these processes and determined that humans have transgressed the limits of boundaries of six of these nine vital dimensions (including climate and biosphere integrity). This is happening not because of the malevolent act of someone who willfully intends destruction on a planetary scale, but because within the economic and material infrastructures that we have constructed, actions with morally good intent (such as feeding our families and heating our homes) may have life-threatening consequences insofar as they contribute to soil erosion, habitat destruction, and climate change (with its attendant disruption of weather patterns on which agriculture depends, intensification of wildfires and hurricanes, sea-level rise, extinction of species, etc., the potential severity of which we have now just a foretaste.) The repercussions of our acts are not immediately evident to us because of the complexity of global relationships and the intergenerational and interspecific consequences of our actions. No one desires to make the earth inhospitable for the people of the Carteret Islands or for their own children or for other species of life, but we are in the process of doing precisely this.
Protestant theologian Willis Jenkins writes in his essay “Atmospheric Powers, Global
Injustice, and Moral Incompetence” (Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 34, 1 [2013]:
65–82]) that the scale and character of climate change is such that frameworks of moral
reasoning that served Christians well in the past are now insufficient and that we need to
complement them with creative practices of cultural transformation, new patterns of action, and an expansion of our moral compass. If the only food available to me to feed my family is
contributing to methane and carbon emissions and soil degradation, is the lesser evil to let my
children and myself go hungry—or to feed my family and compromise the future capacity of my children to feed themselves? This is an impossible question. The “lesser evil” framework of
discernment that Catholic moral theology employs is in this case inadequate. How can we
reason, live, vote, and act for the common good in this context? Future iterations of Forming Consciences could serve Catholics and the common good through engagement with scientific
experts on biospheric degradation and consideration of the possible need for expanded
frameworks of moral discernment. The consultative processes in which the U.S. bishops engaged to produce their pastoral letters The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response (1983) and Economic Justice for All (1986) are precedents for this kind of contribution to the formation of conscience.
3). Assessing and Transforming the 2024 Media Context
In 1976, most Americans kept abreast of public affairs through the major television networks, the flagship national newspapers and magazines, and a great diversity of local radio stations and newspapers. Consequently, there was a common narrative of national and international events and a richly diverse account of the particularities of local contexts. This media landscape no longer exists in the U.S. There are significant differences in the way different television networks report on public affairs, and some approach news as entertainment. Media consolidation and the internet have decimated many local and regional newspapers and forced staff reductions in national journals. Forming Consciences emphasizes that we exercise conscience using both faith and reason. Use of the gift of human reason in public policy assessment in a democracy requires engagement with professional journalism that provides accurate in-depth reporting. (This is especially important in an electoral context in which candidates or their surrogates can run ads about an opponent stating things that are misleading or untrue and in which anyone can post falsehoods on the internet.) Forming Consciences does note the “remarkable superficiality” of our media culture (16).
The document would be even stronger if it discussed this media culture in more depth and encouraged Catholics to seek out and support professional journalism. That this need is real is evident in my classroom experiences. In a discussion of Laudato Si’, for example, a well-intentioned student said that the idea that humans are changing the climate is a hoax. I invited the student to explain how this is so. “I don’t know,” the student replied. “I just heard it from my parents, who read it on Facebook.”
Beyond the Forming Consciences statement and the election itself, the USCCB could serve
Catholics and the common good by reopening the Catholic News Service offices in New York
and Washington, D.C. and then expanding the scope and character of Catholic journalism
beyond its level at the time of the closure of these offices in 2022. Imagine a news service that
not only provides investigative journalism but also offers commentary on public life shaped by
St. Paul’s exhortation: “Never let evil talk pass your lips: say only the good things men need to
hear, things that will really help them. Do nothing that will sadden the Holy Spirit with whom
you were sealed against the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, all passion and anger,
harsh words, slander, and malice of every kind. In place of these, be kind to one another,
compassionate, and mutually forgiving, just as God has forgiven you in Christ” (Eph 4:29-32).
In the introduction to Forming Consciences, the bishops draw an insightful analogy between our body politic and the man whom robbers left beaten and half-dead on the road to Jericho, and they invite us to a binding up of wounds (vii).
Elizabeth Groppe is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Dayton, where she teaches Roman Catholic Systematic Theology. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, her scholarship includes the book Yves Congar’s Theology of the Holy Spirit (Oxford) and her articles appear in journals including Theological Studies and Worship. Her service includes work for the Creation Care Task Force of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati.
