{"id":253,"date":"2008-11-06T19:47:57","date_gmt":"2008-11-06T23:47:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattfife.net\/wordpress\/?p=253"},"modified":"2008-11-06T19:47:57","modified_gmt":"2008-11-06T23:47:57","slug":"catholic-voters-principles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=253","title":{"rendered":"Catholic voters principles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, it’s a bit late for the latest round of voting, but we got into a conversation at work on how Catholics vote.\u00a0 Contrary to popular belief, there is no ‘vote for this guy\u00a0 don’t vote for this guy’ list that we all get.\u00a0 Quite the contrary in fact.\u00a0 Instead, it’s the duty of the local parish+priest to teach the relevant principles of the faith, and then require each of us to apply those principles ourselves.\u00a0 There is not to be any mindless following (as many love to claim).<\/p>\n

Our bishop simply pointed to the US Catholic Bishop’s article on faithful citizenship<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s a very good document that is worth the read if your curious – and good for Catholics to get a good brush up on what principles you’re supposed to be following.\u00a0 If you’re not interested in all the background – just shoot to the principles on page 12\/13 for the basic idea.<\/p>\n

Some interesting bits:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Catholic Church does not endorse candidates nor ballot measures as a policy.\u00a0 Bishops, priests, and church leaders are not to directly promote or discourage voting for any particular candidates or issues from the pulpit or privately.\u00a0 They’re primary duty is to teach and comment on the principles of our faith relating to the issues, but it is up to the individual’s Catholic’s well informed conscience<\/em> to choose candidates and measures.<\/li>\n
  2. Voting your conscience isn’t just a gut-feeling.\u00a0 It involves going out and becoming well informed on Catholic teaching, current state of the matter\/society, and careful reading about the actual candidate\/issue. \u00a0 Then, doctrinal (church teaching) and scriptural research about the matter is to be preformed.\u00a0 Finally, after careful prayer and quietly ‘sitting with God’ in prayer to receptively listen<\/em> to His guidance with all this information about the issue, one forms an course of action.<\/li>\n
  3. Catholics are not to be single-issue voters.\u00a0 They are also to see beyond any partisan politics and vote on the best candidate based on the issues of the day and what their faith and conscience tell them. Catholics are not Democrats nor Republicans – but faithful citizens that will vote for the best candidate.<\/li>\n
  4. Due to our particular political situation – one might <\/em>be able to vote for a pro-abortion candidate in certain cases – but only <\/em>if they are not voting for the candidate for the purpose of promoting pro-abortion policies (and a few other conditions are met – definitely see the fine print for hows and whys in the document for details – it’s not a blanket clause).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Anyway, there’s some really great stuff in there, and it references all the documents they came from in case you want to read more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Well, it’s a bit late for the latest round of voting, but we got into a conversation at work on how Catholics vote.\u00a0 Contrary to popular belief, there is no ‘vote for this guy\u00a0 don’t vote for this guy’ list that we all get.\u00a0 Quite the contrary in fact.\u00a0 Instead, it’s the duty of the local parish+priest to teach the relevant principles of the faith, and then require each of us to apply those principles ourselves.\u00a0 There is not to…<\/p>\n

    Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4WECr-45","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}