In two weeks we will go to the polls to elect city councillors, members of the school committee and the mayor. In another six months, the Commonwealth will hold its presidential primary. And so our minds naturally turn to making choices as citizens of this Commonwealth and these United States.
What does it mean for a Catholic to vote? As a child I started to learn the answer to that question by reciting the pledge of allegiance right before I prayed the Our Father and Hail Mary at the start of every school day (and that was in public school!).
But what does it really mean to vote as a Catholic?
For an answer, I invite you to return to a time when it was illegal for a Catholic to vote, hold office or practice his religion in public under English public law, which riled these parts in 1776, when a Catholic gentleman of Carrollton, Maryland by the name of Charles Carroll signed the Declaration of Independence. Thirteen years later, his cousin John was named the first Catholic Bishop in our country, a man who, by any historian’s assessment, is to be counted among the founding fathers of these United States.
Yet, despite the advocacy for the new American nation which Bishop Carroll embraced (so passionately that it once got him excommunicated as a young priest), or perhaps because of it, he followed three cardinal rules which governed his actions at the intersection of priesthood and patriotism:
1. The government and her laws are to be obeyed, unless they would cause us to sin. Here he, like the Catechism of the Catholic Church, might have cited a late second century Greek apologist: “Pay to all of them their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.”
2. All American citizens have an obligation to participate in the civic life, in order to foster, as our first President put it, “a brotherly affection and love for one another, for their fellow Citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for their brethren who have served in the field, and finally, that [God] would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all, to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind which were the characteristics of the divine author of our blessed religion…”
3. No priest should ever publicly endorse the candidacy of a single person or party. Though Bishop Carroll was a close personal friend of Benjamin Franklin, neither Adams nor Jefferson ever received his public endorsement.
That was Bishop Carroll’s vision for America as patriot and priest: an America established by the will of God through the work of our founding fathers. And this was his vision of the Church in America: “to grow with the growth and bloom with the development of the country,” serving as a leaven in the dough of the great American experiment by promoting the Gospel virtues of true religion.
And we are the inheritors of this great vision, though at times in these difficult days, we seem a long way from making that vision come true.
A long way even from realizing our Bishops’ common guidance in their latest letter to us, Forming Consciences For Faithful Citizenship, wherein they counsel Catholics approaching the voting booth to act on “moral convictions of a well-formed conscience” on such vital issues as human life, promoting peace, marriage and family life, religious freedom, preferential option for the poor and economic justice, health care, migration, combatting unjust discrimination, care for our common home, media and culture, and global solidarity.
So you have exactly two weeks to pray. Without cynicism, sarcasm or snide condescension. With humility, an open heart and a love for the truth. Pray for the country which Bishop John Carroll so loved, that by rendering unto God what is truly God’s, we might render rightly unto Caesar as well.
