Render Unto Caesar
Fr. Muir’s Preaching Notes from October 18, 2020
Render Unto Caesar and God in the Voting Booth
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is asked a loaded question by two rival camps, both maliciously hoping to entrap him. They ask: “Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?” He asks them for a Roman coin used for the tax and asks them whose image it is. When they reply “Caesar’s,” he deftly ends the short verbal battle with one of his greatest riddles: “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” On the surface his answer may appear to be: “yes, pay the tax.”
Often today Catholics are sometimes tempted to think that this means their involvement with Caesar--that is, citizenship, with the affairs of human government--are utterly distinct from their obligations to God. But that is more like the opposite of the meaning of the parable. For the coin belongs to Caesar, true enough. But whose image does Caesar bear? The answer: God’s image. All political authority--precisely because is it human--nests within and under Divine authority. There can be--we may today even say should be--a distinction between religious authority and that of the state. But Jesus’ parable highlights that political authority--again, because it is about human affairs--means that politics is preceded by, and subject to, the One whose image is stamped on each and every human being. Jesus’ disciples can and should serve Caesar, but only under the aegis of their higher loyalty to God.
With that in mind, I’d like to simply answer the question: how should Catholics approach their political responsibilities in light of their religious ones? In a democratic republic like ours in the US, there is much more we do politically than vote in elections, but for our purposes here I’ll focus on that given the upcoming election. How should Catholics render their vote for Caesar in light of what they owe to God? I’ll break it into three related points.
First point: “NO PERFECTLY CATHOLIC PARTY”. Catholic social teaching transcends our current liberal and conservative divide. What the Church has to say about social and political issues corresponds perfectly with neither political camp. Jesus identifies himself with neither the Pharisees nor the Herodians. For better or worse, neither of our political parties perfectly, or even adequately, represents Catholic social teaching. Broadly speaking, the Democratic Party advocates a number of themes and principles reverenced by the Catholic tradition: care for underprivileged, for the migrant and refugee, and for the environment, as well as opposition to capital punishment and to all forms of racism. And again, broadly speaking, the Republican Party sides with Catholic teaching in a number of ways: opposition to abortion and euthanasia, defense of the traditional family, advocacy for conscience protection and freedom of religion.
So far, so frustrating. Are Catholics then left to simply cast their votes based simply on personal or partisan preference? No. Here’s the second point: “PRIORITIZE LIFE.” Among the various values mentioned, priority must be given to the defense of human life, since life is the most fundamental good of all, the one without which the other goods would be meaningless. This is true chronologically (one must be alive, for example, in order to receive just treatment with respect to race or nationality); it is also true logically (the fundamental nature of the value of life is affirmed whenever other rights are responded to; e.g., when you give me a sandwich, at the same time you’re saying “it’s good you’re alive”; when you honor someone’s racial equality even though she is from another place, you’re simultaneously saying “it’s good you’re alive”).
So, a Catholic, in discerning how to vote, must prioritize opposition to abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment. Now, just to keep things complicated, Republicans are relatively right in regard to the first two and Democrats in regard to the last one, though, to be sure, the number of those threatened by abortion and euthanasia is far greater than the number of those under threat of capital punishment. It is occasionally said that Catholics believe all lives are equally sacred, but in this context, that absolutely true observation is rather beside the point. For the relevant question is not which lives are more sacred—those of the unborn, the elderly, the poor, the migrant—but which lives are more directly threatened here and now. We’re talking about the “pre-eminence” of life. It’s not just abstract, but practical, taking in what’s really going on around us, here and now, in the lives of real people.
A thought experiment might illustrate this “pre-eminence.” Imagine you’re a Catholic in the year 1860. Like those Americans, you’re concerned about many important issues, including poverty, tariffs, women’s rights, and secession. Yet out of all those issues, only one of them, slavery, was preeminent—far and away the more important social issue of that time.
It wasn’t abortion—because although abortions did happen then, they were illegal and rare. Those who broke the law and performed abortions were condemned by groups like the American Medical Association. This made abortion a less important issue than the four million Americans—13 percent of the population—who were legally enslaved.
Today, however, the situation is very different. Slavery is illegal, though some criminals still practice it through human trafficking. But abortion is legal, and in this country alone it kills 850,000 pre-born children every year. Ten percent of these abortions take place after the first trimester and use a procedure called dilation and evacuation, something which so grisly I’d prefer not to describe it in a homily. Google it, if you dare. So the pre-eminence of abortion in our age emerges in this practical situation. This pre-eminence is no more arbitrary than that of slavery in 1860.
And so we come to a third point: a Catholic may never vote for a candidate because that candidate supports a morally repugnant position, only despite that support. Thus, for example, a Catholic in good conscience could never say that she will vote for a certain candidate because he is pro-choice. At the same time, a Catholic in good conscience could never say that he will vote for a candidate because he is for capital punishment. Each would have to say some version of “despite his unacceptable position, I will vote for him because, in prudence, I have determined that other commitments of his and/or his own character counter-balances his objectionable opinion.”
Does this lead us into somewhat rough waters? Yes. But to navigate these waters requires a distinction of massive importance with respect to human acts: the distinction between intrinsically evil acts and those which are subject to prudential judgment.
An intrinsically evil act is something that is always wrong no matter the circumstance. No policy goal, no public good, no campaign promise can ever justify it. This is why the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops says that “all issues do not carry the same moral weight and that the moral obligation to oppose policies promoting intrinsically evil acts has a special claim on our consciences and our actions.” Our bishops add that other intrinsically evil acts beside abortion include euthanasia, assisted suicide, cloning, redefining marriage, genocide, torture, targeting civilians in war, and subjecting workers to inhumane conditions, to name a few.
Acts that are subject to prudential judgments, in contrast, involve those on which the Church has not given us specific guidance. So Catholics ought never to disagree in regard to moral principles, but they can indeed fairly disagree about the best means to apply those principles. Every Catholic ought to be for protecting the environment, serving the poor, defending the traditional family, battling social injustice, advocating for religious liberty and freedom of conscience, etc. But not every Catholic is obliged to subscribe to the same means of attaining those ends. Liberal and conservative Catholics can disagree about the prudence of fracking, the prudence of reforming our health-care system, adaptations to tax laws, the level of the minimum wage, and so on. Those latter issues are open to legitimate debate and are matters for prudential judgment.
This distinction is helpful in this way: just because a candidate endorses a different approach to an issue involving prudential judgments than you do, it doesn’t follow that the candidate has endorsed an intrinsic evil.
Let’s add a key piece to the third principle we’re exploring: a Catholic may never vote for a candidate because that candidate supports a morally repugnant position, only despite that support and only because of balancing considerations. So what of those balancing considerations? When could a Catholic vote for a candidate who promotes an intrinsic evil? The only reason that could justify voting for someone who endorses an intrinsic evil like abortion would be in the super-rare case that the alternative candidate endorsed even worse evils. These issues couldn’t just be other intrinsic evils; they would have to be intrinsic evils that reach a scale that is worse than abortion, which the Bishops call the preeminent social issue of our time. Thus, a Catholic couldn’t justify voting for a pro-abortion candidate even if the anti-abortion candidate endorsed another intrinsic evil, such as human cloning, because that causes far less harm than abortion. But this could be justified if, for hypothetically speaking, both candidate A and B promote abortion, but Candidate A allows some regulations while Candidate B doesn’t.
So to recap: how should Catholics engage voting in our country, as subjects of both Caesar (human authority) and, above all, the Lord Jesus Christ? By knowing and applying these three points:
1) “NO PERFECTLY CATHOLIC PARTY” Catholic social teaching transcends our current liberal and conservative divide.
2) “PRIORITIZE LIFE” Priority must be given to the defense of human life.
3) A Catholic may never vote for a candidate because that candidate supports a morally repugnant position, only despite that support and only because of balancing considerations.
Is this easy to do? Not at all. It requires forming our consciences and applying them. Friends will give us a hard time for not toeing the party line in some cases. But our loyalty is finally to Christ and his Church. But it’s not easy. So in light of these points, a word of hope, because I think there’s a good argument that the greatest sin of our age is despair. That nothing we do matters. That darkness and evil win. We’re called to be people of hope because we belong to Christ the Risen Lord. We have hope because we bear the image of Jesus in our bodies and souls. To us, Pope Francis says, in his encyclical The Joy of the Gospel, words of great hope for us (84): “Nobody can go off to battle unless he is fully convinced of victory beforehand. If we start without confidence, we have already lost half the battle and we bury our talents. While painfully aware of our frailties, we have to march on without giving in, keeping in mind what the Lord said to St Paul: ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’”
The Pope wants us to see that our hope isn’t finally in the political progress of Caesar, but in the victory of the true Emperor: the Lord who is God. He says, “Christian triumph is always a cross, yet a cross which is at the same time a victorious banner borne with aggressive tenderness against the assaults of evil. The evil spirit of defeatism is brother to the temptation to separate, before its time, the wheat from the weeds; it is the fruit of an anxious and self-centered lack of trust.” In other words, he is saying us, have great hope, and be joyful, confident warriors against evil, repaying Caesar what belongs to Caesar (our faithful citizenship), and repay to God what belongs to God. Which, of course, is everything, including our very selves, and all our actions, political and otherwise.
First, Catholics must never promote or directly vote for propositions or laws whose goal is to maintain or increase access to abortion. Pope John Paul II said, “In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it” (Evangelium Vitae, 73).
Second, a Catholic must never vote for a politician because of that politician’s support for legal abortion. To do so is to commit a grave sin. As Cardinal Ratzinger said, “A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate’s permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia.”
Third, Catholics may not vote for a candidate who supports abortion merely because they agree with the candidate on other, less important issues. In order to understand this rule we need to understand the difference between issues that involve intrinsic evils and issues that involve prudential judgments.
An intrinsically evil act is something that is always wrong no matter the circumstance. No policy goal, no public good, no sweet-sounding campaign promise can ever justify it. This is why the USCCB says that “all issues do not carry the same moral weight and that the moral obligation to oppose policies promoting intrinsically evil acts has a special claim on our consciences and our actions.” The USCCB adds that other intrinsically evil acts beside abortion include euthanasia, assisted suicide, cloning, redefining marriage, genocide, torture, targeting civilians in war, and subjecting workers to inhumane conditions.
Prudential judgments, in contrast, involve issues on which the Church has not given us specific guidance. For example, we have a moral duty to help the poor, but the Church has not given us a list of specific policy proposals Catholics must endorse in order to carry out that duty. Catholics can reasonably disagree with one another about how to help the poor in practical terms and even forge compromises to resolve issues involving prudential judgments.
This means that just because a candidate endorses a different approach to an issue involving prudential judgments than you do, it doesn’t follow that the candidate has endorsed an intrinsic evil. As Archbishop Charles Chaput put it:
You can’t say that somebody’s not Christian because he wants to limit taxation. This may not be the most effective policy, but it’s certainly a legitimate Catholic position; and to say that it’s somehow intrinsically evil like abortion doesn’t make any sense at all.
A Catholic can never vote for a candidate because the candidate supports an intrinsic evil. We also can’t vote for a candidate who endorses an intrinsic evil just because we agree with that candidate on issues that, however important, involve prudential judgment. For example, we could not vote for a candidate who campaigns on a plan to forcibly sterilize the poor because we like his job-creation ideas better than the other candidate’s.
