Rite and Reason: Moral judgment in the concrete can be difficult, writes Rev Professor Patrick Hannon.
In the US on October 1st last Archbishop Raymond Burke of St Louis published a pastoral letter entitled On Our Civic Responsibility for the Common Good. The pastoral is a detailed account of the political responsibilities of Catholics, especially as regards abortion, euthanasia, cloning, embryonic stem-cell research and homosexual unions.
Its context was of course the US presidential election campaign in which these issues played some part. And it is of special interest because Archbishop Burke is probably the most prominent of the bishops who earlier this year said they would deny Communion to politicians regarded as favouring "pro-choice" abortion legislation.
The letter is in the main a reiteration of standard Catholic teaching about civic responsibility, especially in relation to "promoting respect for the inviolable dignity of all human life".
It offers a theology of civic engagement in general, as well as concrete guidance for voters concerning what are now usually called "life issues". Its tone bespeaks what is obviously a deeply felt sense of pastoral responsibility vis-à-vis US abortion law and practice. Much of what it proposes is unsurprising in terms of Catholic teaching and of current US concerns, though a few points have caused comment. Some have been taken aback by its unqualified repudiation of the idea that "a candidate's position on the death penalty and war are as important as his or her position on procured abortion and same sex 'marriage'."
But the most remarkable feature of the letter is that it seems to represent a softening of the archbishop's attitude to candidates labelled as pro-choice.
The debate engendered by his earlier dicta continued over the summer, following the US Bishops' Conference June decision to leave the question whether to exclude from Communion or not to each diocesan bishop.
The great majority of bishops took the view that exclusion from Communion is not an appropriate response. But a few persisted in a view that it is, and until October 1st Archbishop Burke - though he had earlier signalled a re-think - was among them.
The pastoral does not formally address the issue of exclusion from Communion but it does take up a related issue, co-operation in wrong-doing. This is related because in Catholic Church discipline mortal sin - grave wrong, committed deliberately - bars from Communion; as does co-operation in another's such wrong-doing, if it amounts to wilful endorsement of the wrong. Espousal by a candidate of a platform that included legislation enabling grave wrong would raise the question whether he or she is thereby doing wrong, and whether a voter who wished to support the candidate would be doing wrong too.
Moral judgment in the concrete can be difficult, as was recognised by Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas among other authorities, and it's certainly not clear-cut in the conditions of modern political life.
Anyone can see that if you believe something is immoral you won't ordinarily want to vote for it; but what if voting against or abstaining is not going to improve the situation now? Does it make a moral difference that your vote is reluctant and known to be such? And what if there are other matters of moral import which would be helped by the same vote?
Catholic moral theology provides guidelines about co-operation in another's wrong-doing which have been found helpful in other contexts, notably in the field of medical ethics. Naturally it's wrong to co-operate if co-operation means backing an action or omission or state of affairs because you want the evil outcome - this is called formal co-operation. If you don't want it, but are prepared to go along with it, the co-operation is said to be merely material; and whether it's justified or not depends both on the closeness of one's involvement and on the reasons for being involved at all.
It is these principles which allow Archbishop Burke to say that "in certain circumstances it is morally permissible for a Catholic to vote for a candidate who supports some immoral practices while opposing other immoral practices".
Strangely, he does not consider the dilemma of politicians vis-à-vis policies which include items offensive to their personal moral convictions, though of course the guidelines apply to them too.
More puzzling still is the question why it should have taken a memo from Cardinal Ratzinger - cited in the letter - to draw attention to what is a standard device in Catholic moral theological analysis, meant to help apply moral norms in concrete situations.
Technically these principles do not belong to the corpus of official teaching, but their use in its application possesses a solidly authoritative status, as their reiteration by Cardinal Ratzinger shows. It is impossible to understand how they could be overlooked in an account of a Catholic's moral responsibility in the political realm.
Rev Dr Patrick Hannon is Professor of Moral Theology at St Patrick's College, Maynooth. Currently he is a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York City.