Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego gave a speech entitled “Conscience, Candidates and Discipleship in Voting” in which he posited that:
Frequently in discussions of the application of Catholic social teaching to voting, the question is raised whether one issue has a unique priority among all of the other issues in its claim upon believers in the current election cycle. Some have categorized abortion in that way. Others, climate change. This question deserves deeper scrutiny. ...
Four points should be considered.
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- There is no mandate in universal Catholic social teaching that gives a categorical priority to either of these issues as uniquely determinative of the common good.
- The death toll from abortion is more immediate, but the long-term death toll from unchecked climate change is larger and threatens the very future of humanity.
- Both abortion and the environment are core life issues in Catholic teaching.
- The designation of either of these issues as the preeminent question in Catholic social teaching at this time in the United States will inevitably be hijacked by partisan forces to propose that Catholics have an overriding duty to vote for candidates that espouse that position. Recent electoral history shows this to be a certainty.
Contrary to Bishop McElroy, I believe abortion is of preeminent importance. I draw here on St. John Paul II's encyclical Evangelim Vitae, in which he wrote that:
Among all the crimes which can be committed against life, procured abortion has characteristics making it particularly serious and deplorable. The Second Vatican Council defines abortion, together with infanticide, as an "unspeakable crime". ...
Christian Tradition-as the Declaration issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith points out so well-is clear and unanimous, from the beginning up to our own day, in describing abortion as a particularly grave moral disorder.
Consider also John Paul II's apostolic exhortation Christifideles Laici:
The common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights—for example, the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture—is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition for all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination.
In the United States, the USCCB's Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility states:
The threat of abortion remains our preeminent priority because it directly attacks life itself, because it takes place within the sanctuary of the family, and because of the number of lives destroyed.
To be sure they go on to counsel that one "cannot dismiss or ignore other serious threats to human life and dignity such as racism, the environmental crisis, poverty and the death penalty," but that doesn't mean that any of them have displaced abortion as the Church's preeminent priority.
Given that clear teaching, I do not understand how Bishop McElroy in good conscience can claim to the contrary.
