Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
Father Don Wolf, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, offers a Catholic perspective on the issues confronting each person today.
Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
November 3, 2024 | "Navigating the Ballot with a Moral Compass"
Ever wondered how your faith can guide your choices at the ballot box? Join as we unpack the spiritual and moral dimensions of voter participation. In an era where political campaigns often skew toward negativity and dishonesty, we explore the powerful role faith can play in fostering hope and resilience. Together, let's challenge the stereotypes that equate advocating for Christian values with Christian nationalism and instead focus on how collective virtue can enhance the common good.
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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.
This is Living Catholic with Fr Don Wolfe. Living Catholic is a fresh look at issues confronting each of us today. This show deals with living Catholic, what that means for Catholics, as well as the impact on the rest of society. You certainly don't have to be Catholic to enjoy this show. And now your host, Fr Don Wolfe.
Speaker 1:Welcome Oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm Father Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. We stand, of course, on the cusp of the election and I feel it necessary to say something about our vote. While the Church doesn't issue instructions for voting, nor demands its people to mark their X next to one name rather than another, she does require every member to do his or her best to reason to the best choice for the future of the country. This responsibility falls on the shoulders of each of us In as much as we are citizens and we are all equally a part of the system of choosing those who will govern us. This system functions only as we are serious about fulfilling our responsibility. We are, in fact, performing a spiritual act as we enter the voting booth. While we may engage in political discussion with all of the enthusiasm and seriousness of sport, when it comes time to make a decision about who we will elect, we are tasked with making an adult choice about our future. The responsibility we're given is one that functions only if we embrace it and perform it to the best of our ability. As we vote, we're enacting the values and the needs of ourselves, our community and our country. These are not whims of style, but are instead the foundation of our common life together and as serious followers of Christ. Our desire is that our own lives reflect a commitment to the teachings of Jesus and a longing to find him and to serve him in our midst. We do this not only in our own individual commitments and sacrifices, but also in a communal way, so that the society of which we are a part reflects these same values. There are some believers, of course, who imagine that these are two separate spheres and they need not overlap, that is, that our private moral commitments need not ever reflect themselves in our common public behavior, need not ever reflect themselves in our common public behavior. In fact, I've seen a number of religious leaders insist that to make any private religious value into a public one is to do violence to those who don't share those same values, as if making a law to enjoin a moral behavior is illegitimate, since it might be the case that others could disagree. But every person holds some things to be good and some things to be bad, both for they themselves as well as the society at large.
Speaker 1:How could it be the case that it would be wrong to pursue the good in public. Imagine, for example, we lived in a society in which child sacrifice was not only permitted but encouraged. In this dystopia, with all enthusiasm, babies are ripped from their mother's arms every month and thrown onto a pyre because it's thought to be good for everyone that that kind of sacrifice take place. And yet, at the same time, in this society, we imagine we're allowed to vote to pass laws to enforce the laws that are passed. We imagine we're allowed to vote to pass laws to enforce the laws that are passed, and we're given the power to choose those candidates who would propose and then pass, and then enact and then enforce laws. Wouldn't we be compelled to try and elect those people who would stop that behavior? Wouldn't this be a good that we ought to pursue with all enthusiasm? In fact, wouldn't it be fair to make the proposal that our politics should hinge on the issue that babies not be taken from their mothers and pitched into the public fire?
Speaker 1:And wouldn't it be a good thing to pass such a law, even though there are those in society who not only think public immolation is a good thing, but who would be offended if it weren't possible to keep doing it? Wouldn't we not only feel compelled to stop such a practice. Wouldn't we congratulate ourselves on having stopped it, even if a very substantial number of our neighbors were horrified by the law prohibiting it? Of course we would. None of us would feel content to imagine that we allowed such behavior to continue and yet we did nothing to oppose it or at least complicate it in some manner In the course of our work as we promoted our candidates and convinced others to vote as we do. We would congratulate ourselves if our only success was to lessen the number of babies who were offered in sacrifice. At least some babies saved would be better than no babies rescued from their eventual fate. It is an uncontested good that fewer children die and more children live. We would celebrate and promote our vote making such a thing happen, and we would certainly insist that people make their way to the polls and vote with all conviction with this one moral imperative in mind Fewer dead, more living. In this scenario, we would also insist that voting does matter and we're compelled to express our private morality in the public forum.
Speaker 1:Were we to choose to keep our private convictions solely private, we would betray the content of our morality and deny the substance of our responsibility to our neighbor, especially to those children who might otherwise have lived, not to mention to the mothers whose hearts would be forever broken. It might be said that we're infringing on the values of society in general, and we believers have no right to do such a thing. But we all know our values are ours and they are for the good of all, not just ourselves personally and privately. Putting the values that are at the heart of our belief and at the heart of the common good into practice publicly is not an offense against society. Sure, we do live in a country in which there are many different versions of what's good. Many people do in fact believe the good of the person and personal morality shouldn't believe into the public sphere. What is good for me may not be good for thee, and it's true.
Speaker 1:The grand experiment of prohibition, for example, was founded on the notion that the citizenry of the whole country should observe the tenets of the temperance movement. Those who passed this into law presumed that what was a private good should be a public law, and they were wrong. The law was wrong, however, in its details, and it is recognized as an infringement on a practice that should be left best to private decision-making. But let's face it, even in our day and time in which those kinds of restrictions are made fun of, we all agree that there are substances and practices so harmful to public good that they are disallowed. Just think California has disallowed plastic straws as deleterious to the public good and so are not permitted for public use, which goes to show that we are far from imagining that public good and private virtue are somehow distant from one another. The state and the union, regarded as the vanguard of public opinion and public practice, has no problem imposing private morality in public spaces. Any notion can go too far, of course, which is why elections count has no problem imposing private morality in public spaces. Any notion can go too far, of course, which is why elections count. There is no great playbook outlining the limits and possibilities of public decision-making. That's done by the people's, our representatives.
Speaker 1:The policies for the enactment of the common good of all is decided in the common forum of our representatives, who together create the agreements and the practices we all abide by. In their interactions they represent us and their lawmaking together helps to name and evaluate and enact our common good. Together, they also check the extremes and speak into the silences of our common life. When the common good is pursued in common with the intent of enacting the moral good of all, everyone benefits. But it functions only when we install our representatives who will enact our values more accurately and most fully, which means we have to speak and our votes are our voices. We can't afford to be indifferent to the direction of the country or to the politics of the time. What happens at the ballot box matters.
Speaker 1:There is a notion in some circles that people of faith don't bother themselves with the politics of the moment. They keep themselves raised above the stains and nastiness of political contestation. But there's nothing holy about that kind of position. We're invited to participate as citizens, to do our best to chart a path for ourselves and for our neighbors together. It's our responsibility to respond. It's not sufficient to pass off our participation as if it meant nothing, as if the truly spiritual person didn't deign to study and to choose and then to act.
Speaker 1:What if, for example, a cardinal decided that his vote for the pope in a papal conclave didn't matter? What if he were indifferent to who might be chosen to lead the church? If this was his decision, he would shirk his duty, since he had been named specifically to be a papal elector. One of his responsibilities is to choose. Deciding not to choose wouldn't be an expression of sanctity or an instant of rising above the imperfection of the system. It would be an abdication of the responsibility he had for the system. Pretending the future doesn't matter and thereby placing it in someone else's hands doesn't make the cardinal a holier person. It simply makes his choice someone else's choice, and so it is with us.
Speaker 1:Secondly, god is the God of nations. Nations are instruments in the fulfillment of God's will for the world. True God can use any country led by any person to fulfill the divine will. We don't have to believe that the US is divinely inspired or divinely empowered to be God's sole instrument to know that, as a country, we can enact the will of God among us and as voters. As a country, we can enact the will of God among us and as voters, we are part of enacting that work. God uses our lives to enact his will. Can God not use our collective intention and our communal action to achieve the divine will through us? That sounds decidedly old-fashioned. Of course.
Speaker 1:It has become very unpopular to speak as if the future of God at work in the world depends upon the nasty politics of the election season, as if God wouldn't be comfortable using the gritty realities of political parties and the grimy lives of electoral candidates to fashion the divine will for the world. And true, there have been too many times in which the platform of one party or another has been claimed to be the morality of living Jesus' teaching in the world. Imagine if we unearth the video of a sermon in which a minister actually preached that God wanted you to vote for Nixon over Kennedy in 1960. What would we think if he proclaimed his choice because he insisted it was the divine will that Dick Nixon become the president, in order that God's goodness could flow through the veins of the country? We'd laugh out loud if we weren't too horrified for him and for those who listen to him.
Speaker 1:But do we really believe God doesn't care about our decisions? Do we have no responsibility to do our best to discern what God desires for us and for those in our lives? And as we do, shouldn't we share our reasoning with others? Of course we provide all of the caveats about our incomplete knowledge and our own prejudices and our capacity to be wrong and our temptation to be wrongheaded. But in the end, would we be comfortable saying that we're going to vote because we think it's the right choice, but it doesn't matter to God at all? And it doesn't matter according to our measure of right and wrong, since we do choose and we do hold the future of our country in our hands. Don't we appeal to God to make the right choice and to act in the right way?
Speaker 1:Again, imagine we were talking about making a decision for our family. We should pray, we should seek the will of God in whatever choice we're going to make, and we should do our best to know as much about the consequences of our choice, including their alternatives, as we can. But when it comes time to make the decision, would we be comfortable saying to ourselves and to others that it doesn't matter what we choose? Would we say that our decision, made in faith and following the teachings of Christ and his church, makes no difference at all to ourselves, to our family and to the world? Wouldn't we rather say that we've made the best decision according to our faithful implementation of God's will? Wouldn't we trust it is our best choice to be the right decision for all involved? And if we do this for our family, wouldn't we do so for the country and as we do, wouldn't we also say that we're doing our best to complete God's will among us?
Speaker 1:Now, many people have called this kind of thinking Christian nationalism, and they've described it as a uniquely terrible attribute of our age. Of course, we are Christians who belong to a nation, and we would desire above all that our nation be Christian in that it reflects the gift and the graces of the Christians who live in it. We would hope it would be a corporate example of the individual faithfulness of those who constitute it. There are weird definitions and particular interpretations of that term, not all of which are accurate and not all of which we can agree with, but there is no shame in wanting our country to be a place in which Christian virtue is named, understood, pursued and practiced. This is, in fact, a very old Catholic understanding of corporate life that we pursue virtue together. After all, it is much easier to live a chaste life if we all understand and practice chastity together rather than envision it to be a solely private pursuit. The same goes with honest dealing, avoiding lying, honoring marriage and promoting life. The same goes with honest dealing, avoiding lying, honoring marriage and promoting life. Each of these are easier to achieve if they are corporate goods we pursue as a people, rather than simply self-contained ideals we only honor personally.
Speaker 1:There are excesses, of course, but if we're a Christian people and we vote as citizens to determine the future and the constitutive nature of our nation, would it be far-field to want to be a Christian nation In the concourse of our foreign policy? After all, we expect all manner of nations to affirm what we define as our values. Over and over again, we've insisted that child marriage and genital mutilation and the death penalty for homosexual behavior and sex slavery are inimical inimical to our moral standards as a nation. We've also shamelessly touted the values of democracy, capitalism, free markets, gender equality and equal education for all, among all measure of other policies we insist are the minimum for a modern country like ours. Other policies, we insist, are the minimum for a modern country like ours. We have no anxiety expecting other nations to affirm our practices and agree to our understandings of human life and society. In fact, we're proud to tell others how we expect them to act in order to be members of a common world together with us.
Speaker 1:To remain mute about Christian values among Christians in our own society and our own Christian values at work in our world seems odd and maybe destructive. Why wouldn't we want our values recognized and practiced in our society? Thirdly, we should remember that we are a people together, who live our lives as a nation. In the heated rhetoric of the campaign, especially for national office, we're tempted to forget that fact. On both sides of the politics of those running, it has become common to invoke apocalyptic language to warn about what will happen if the other side wins the end of the world as we know it. Those are the words invoked to guard us against voting for those other guys, and those words are disturbing. Making the choice for the executive office of government is not to decide the fate of the nation or the future of us as a people. It's to manifest our desire for the policies and politics of the country, not its survival. Ratcheting up the warnings to include a fear for the future of the country itself is to make the election something it's not.
Speaker 1:The National Public Radio commentator, daniel Pinkwater, made a comment about those concerns more than 30 years ago. He'd just graduated from college then and was excited about his first opportunity to vote. He's talking about his first experience. Many years before that comment, 30 years ago, he looked through the slate of candidates and chose the one he thought the most worthy of his vote. This person was not of the political party his family had traditionally supported, but he was obviously a superior candidate to the one running from the family's preferred side of things. And so Pinkwater went to the polls and cast his vote, including for his superior candidate, and when he got home his father asked him if he'd voted, excited about his new civic responsibility. Daniel told him about his vote and his candidate. You did what His father exploded. You voted for who he spluttered. How could you do that? So Pinkwater explained his candidate. You did what His father exploded you voted for who he spluttered. How could you do that? So Pinkwater explained his choice.
Speaker 1:I looked at the candidates, and the one from the party you vote for was venal and corrupt. It was the logical choice. I voted for the other guy. His father clarified everything for him. You college boys you think you know everything. Here's the truth. They're all venal and corrupt. That's not the point. The point is you vote for the system, the party and what it can do, not the man. That's what voting is for. Now. I don't know if that exhausts the description of our civic opportunity. But it's important to remember that the options available to us are larger than the personalities of the candidates, and the choices we have are more varied and at different levels than simply that we're not going to get our way or we're going to get our way or not. I become uncomfortable when people begin speaking as if, by not making the right choice, we're extinguishing the entire republic, and I might note this seems to be a message common to both political parties.
Speaker 1:Fourthly, there are many other choices on the ballot we cast than simply who the president will be. The energy and the excitement of the election centers on the choice for the highest office, and there is no doubt this choice is important for the whole country. But governance isn't limited to the executive branch. It also includes the legislative and the judicial. Not only that, we're voting our choices about offices at national, state and local levels. Responsible voters should be ready to cast their ballots with their local concerns and local options in mind. It really isn't sufficient to enter the polling booth only committed to the presidential choice and then randomly marking the ballot for all the other choices there In the course of our lives. It will almost certainly matter as much who's on the state Supreme Court and who will exercise their authority as, say, a corporation commissioner, as who will be inaugurated as president.
Speaker 1:Catholic social teaching reminds us of the principle of subsidiarity. That sounds imposing, but it's nothing more than the insight that it's best to handle things on the lowest practical level. Who's best to manage a soup kitchen in Oklahoma City is a decision best left to the head of St Vincent de Paul Society in the parish, not to the head of the St Vincent de Paul Society in Washington DC. So it is with the arms of government. The local level, the most immediate, is of summary importance to the day-to-day lives and policies we live, so we have to care about them as much as anything else.
Speaker 1:And finally, our temptation in the political season is to be consumed by the personal. I don't know if it's inescapable in our age of social media, but it has come close to being so. The details of the personal and the minutiae of each individual moment and every isolated comment are analyzed and trumpeted as if it were the only determining matter in our choice. If it were the only determining matter in our choice. And it's frightening to imagine people make their decision based on looks or the ephemera of personality rather than on substantive matters, which is why we have to resist the temptations, because the choices are larger than these things. And as a side note, it is regretfully the same in the church.
Speaker 1:Archbishop John Quinn reminded we once that people used to come to Rome in order to visit and pray at the tombs of the apostles. Who the pope was or what his policies were or what he looked like were of no consequence to the people who visited there. And why would it be? He had no consequence in their lives of faith or practice. Now it's different. People come to Rome to see the Pope. We're consumed by the intimate foibles and the temperamental differences of the candidates. These are, in fact, almost the entire sum of their campaign. But we have to avoid the temptation of our fascination with the personal and focus on the functional if we're going to make a good choice. Remember, for the first 50 years of the country, the candidates themselves didn't campaign. That's a tradition I'd prefer to return to. But remember, it's in our hands. We get to choose. Let's say our prayers, size up our options and go to the polls. And may God bless us Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment, faith in Verse of a poem today called Just Before November.
Speaker 1:They all lie all the time, without surcease. As the season proceeds, the untruths increase, or so it seems, as the news flows to us daily. The talking heads share all this gaily, as if it were a game, mere contest, nothing more. Verbal twister on a national floor, until we grow tired of all the vitriol and the outrage it prompts begins to stall. So we grow numb, our acuities insensate more and more so as the hour grows late. Insensate more and more so as the hour grows late. I suspect it has always been just so.
Speaker 1:The standards for the contest set thus low, except nowadays, the campaigns are for years. We see so little except through their tears. All is brooded as material for the next time. When another candidate is in line and the rage rages on our teeth. On edge, we stand precipitously on the ledge, the danger being we could at once slip and fall into the wide and dark abyss. Before the triumph of the cloying lies, we could reclaim our time and lift our eyes to the Lord, who gathers us as one and in the darkness is as the sun. That is just before November. I hope that you can join us in the future as we continue to reflect on and dive deeply into what it means to be a living Catholic.
Speaker 2:Living Catholic is a production of Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.