Why the Vatican Discourages Voting Commands. Even Important Ones.
If you sat in the pew recently while a pastoral letter was read at Mass directing you to vote No on a ballot measure, you might have left with an uncomfortable knot in your stomach. This has been shared with me by many Catholics, including fellow dedicated pro-lifers.
Even if you agreed wholeheartedly with the pro-life conviction behind the letter, something about having your freedom commanded and conscience bound from the altar feels unsettling. You aren’t alone, and you aren’t being unfaithful for feeling this way.
The other day, I walked my voting envelope to the big blue metal mailbox and proudly cast my pro-life vote. Yet while I was sliding the envelope through the metal slot, I paused to read the pickup decal which read “3:00PM” before realizing this street corner was eerily silent. A question crossed my mind: is this the Good Samaritan moment I am called to?
It felt flat. Even though it was important, I did nothing to share the joy of the Gospel because no one was around.
In conversing with an Italian canon lawyer about this, he sighed and indicated that it’s become somewhat of sad moment in some countries where faith starts to be expressed through voting. In a thick accent he said, “Telling someone to be pro-life by voting is like inviting someone to dinner and offering them a nutritious olive. To be sure, an olive is a good food. But it is not enough.”
The Good Samaritan and the Tricky Shortcut of Pro-Life Duty
A bishop’s essential duty is both sanctifying (help the people on their journey to becoming holy) and pastoral (sharing the Gospel in the concrete realities they face). He must form consciences with truth and help eliminate any evil intentions from the interior hearts of the people. But the risk of this turning into directives is at the heart of Jesus’ warning in Luke 10 with the Good Samaritan.
The priest and the Levite who passed by the beaten man were not monsters. They were observing their religious duty and presumably exhausted after leaving the temple. We must remember that Jesus never condemns religious duty; he condemns indifference on the way to perform it.
The Church provides you protection against a misunderstanding and overreach of authority in civil matters.[i] And although your conscience is bound to support truth (as opposed to private desires, partisan politics, envy, or greed), the Church does not try to predict unintended consequences that might come about from a law. That is why your conscience must personally wrestle with the decision.
Every moral crisis begins with a person, not with a law. The tragedy of abortion begins with the unmet needs and anxieties of an expectant mother.
As Saint John Paul II reminded us, the theology of life is deeply rooted in the Good Samaritan parable “to the point of accepting responsibility for his life.” [ii] Not in writing, but in person. Vatican II tries to prompt us to be creative:
“Let the layman not imagine that his pastors are always such experts, that to every problem which arises, however complicated, they can readily give him a concrete solution, or even that such is their mission. Rather, enlightened by Christian wisdom and giving close attention to the teaching authority of the Church, let the layman take on his own distinctive role.”[iii]
Can a Bishop Direct Your Vote? The Catholic Legal Tension
To be fair, this is an area where theologians and canonists recognize a real tension. Canon law technically doesn’t prohibit it, even as it protects you against it.[iv]
On one hand, the Church says the bishop should judge the moral content of a law whenever fundamental rights or the salvation of souls requires it.[v] Keep in mind this was written shortly after the horrors of WWII forced some countries citizens into personally doing things against their conscience.
On the other hand, the Church says you should be protected and maintain your autonomy. (see endnote IV) Some people think this only applies to issues like taxation or judges, but that is not what canon law says.
The Second Vatican Council attempted to be really clear on the theology of this. The Church is not a technical expert, it cannot provide ready-made solutions, it does not pretend to know the unintended consequences, etc. (see endnote III).
That is another reason why a top-down directive fails true discernment.
The Church in India Gives an Example
We can learn a tremendous amount from places where the Church is vibrant but has no political leverage. In India, Catholics represent less than 2%. Cardinal Anthony Poola recently summarized their posture:
“The Church cannot proclaim Christ through power, but through humble service, sincere dialogue, courageous witness, and compassionate presence.” The Church in India takes the defense of human life with immense seriousness, but operates within three starting points:
The law already outlaws sex-selective abortion (to protect girls), yet this apparently is a major ongoing problem the Church is concerned with.
In some rural areas, girls are still treated as financial burdens due to a dowry system.
Catholics have virtually no political power.
Because it is clear over there that law does not always equal culture, the bishops never treated politics as the primary theater where Catholics live out the gospel. Instead, parishes train the faithful to become the living eyes and ears of the Church. Human dignity is taught extensively in pre-marriage counselling, and dioceses deploy networks of trained lay volunteers to make personal house calls to mothers facing crisis. They save lives through in-person accompaniment, not leverage.
Aquinas and Pope Benedict XVI on the Limits of Top-Down Decrees
Saint Thomas understood that decrees totally fail to manufacture interior virtue. He also knew that free citizens could not live the moral life by proxy (through another, through distant action, through passing a collection basket).
It requires “prudence” which is the intentional act of applying moral truths to complex and messy situations right in front of you. When an authority presents you with a pre-packaged voting command, it reduces moral discernment and human wisdom to a mere flowchart:
Is X bad? Then do Y.
There are two other considerations from Aquinas:
Human law cannot outlaw every vice (I only say this here so that we get out of the mindset of attacking vice more than we promote virtue). If the state attempts to eradicate all evils at once, it risks making things much worse according to him.
Commands that exceed their given authority don’t bind your conscience. When an authority imposes a decree that goes beyond its legitimate sphere, he actually calls this a violence against the conscience, even if it is something meant for the common good.
The virtue of prudence is one lived deeply from within, looking forward toward the progress Catholics want to see, while looking backward at what failed in the past. He realized some of us would want to outlaw everything bad, so he spent a lot of time warning against that. This is something Pope Benedict XVI echoed, stating the duty to work toward a just society is the role of the lay faithful.
Pope Benedict XVI is an example of someone who noticeably developed his position over time. While working for John Paul II, he was very clear: he wanted you to vote in favor of pro-life referendums[vi]. But then he seemingly balanced himself out a few years later as pope by echoing what Thomas Aquinas said above.[vii] I believe Pope Benedict’s initial firmness is in part due to his history growing up in WWII Germany, where ordinary citizens were compelled or pressured into doing evil things. He did not trust states that allowed any weakness on human dignity issues.
The Uncomfortable Overlap with a Bishop’s Directive and the AI Debate
As artificial intelligence continues to pose major problems and theological questions for the Vatican, the Church has voiced deep concern about the risk of reducing human dignity and moral agency (your ability to act freely for what is right) into an algorithm.
A voting directive falls right into that same trap. Human discernment, when it is top-down, is actually a code. Input the doctrine and output the vote. It is binary. It bypasses the creative, prayerful conscience God gave you, turning your human wisdom into something of a number game.
This Tension Became Concrete
A person who I have known to be pro-life in the most concrete ways surprised me when he told me this time he feels like it’s important to vote against what the Church directed him to. I disagreed with his vote, but his dilemma was entirely legitimate, and it actually got me to think more about the Church in India.
He was deeply concerned about what he viewed as a potentially sweeping law driving vulnerable mothers into the underground market. The Church really struggles to reach the poor and serve those who are hidden. There is somewhat of a benefit to ministry and care and even saving lives when problems are out in the open. Even if his prudential judgment would turn out totally wrong, he was very clear that this is about loving the person right in front of him. He passed the Good Samaritan test.
A bishop must preach the truth boldly. He must make our hearts melt for the vulnerabilities all around us. But if our pro-life battles are only for winning, or for teaching a lesson to those whom we disagree, then we have already lost the plot.
We are called to be unapologetically and consistently pro-life. That means it must be in-person and not by proxy. Not distant. We must be willing to be late to church in order to meet Christ in those who are facing a seriously hard time, and we must take responsibility for their wellbeing (Luke 10).
[i] Canon Law 227 “The lay Christian faithful have the right to have recognized that freedom which all citizens have in the affairs of the earthly city. When using that same freedom, however, they are to take care that their actions are imbued with the spirit of the gospel and are to heed the doctrine set forth by the magisterium of the Church.” Code of Canon Law - Book II - The People of God - Part I. (Cann. 208-329)
[ii] St. John Paul II. “A stranger is no longer a stranger for the person who must become a neighbour to someone in need, to the point of accepting responsibility for his life, as the parable of the Good Samaritan shows so clearly (cf. Lk 10:25-37). Even an enemy ceases to be an enemy for the person who is obliged to love him (cf. Mt 5:38-48; Lk 6:27-35), to "do good" to him (cf. Lk 6:27, 33, 35) and to respond to his immediate needs promptly and with no expectation of repayment (cf. Lk 6:34-35). Section 41 of Evangelium Vitae (25 March 1995)
[iii] Vatican II. Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes. Section 43.
[iv] Where canon law protects you from a bishop’s overreach: See Canon 227. Where it supports the bishop: see Canon 747. Some people believe that 227 refers to ordinary matters like taxation while 747 refers to fundamental rights, but that is not what the text says. The Church does not have the canonical authority to say, “therefore, you must check No”.
[v] “The Church should have true freedom to preach the faith, to teach her social doctrine, to exercise her role freely among men, and also to pass moral judgment in those matters which regard public order when the fundamental rights of a person or the salvation of souls require it. In this, she should make use of all the means—but only those—which accord with the Gospel and which correspond to the general good according to the diversity of times and circumstances.” Section 76 Gaudium et spes
[vi] Cardinal Ratzinger (future Pope Benedict XVI) Doctrinal Note on some questions regarding the participation of Catholics in political life
[vii] Benedict XVI “The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the State. Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice. She has to play her part through rational argument and she has to reawaken the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and prosper. A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church. Yet the promotion of justice through efforts to bring about openness of mind and will to the demands of the common good is something which concerns the Church deeply.” Section 28 Deus caritas est (December 25, 2005)
