Post-election Reflection

What is a priest to do?

I just cannot win.  Before the election, quoting Pope Francis, I preached that Catholics should study the issues, pray about them and vote according to their conscience and I was lambasted by my conservative friends for encouraging people to vote for Clinton.  Now after the election when I say that Catholics should stop attacking people for how they voted in conscience, I am lambasted by my liberal friends for defending those who voted for Trump.  I just cannot win.

And when, like I did before the election, I insist that the platforms of both parties do not conform fully to Catholic teaching, both sides of the ideological divide cry foul.  They believe that their man/woman is practically a saint; how dare I impugn his/her message!  I just cannot win.

It is at times like this that I have existential doubt as to my mission as a priest, of course not because I cannot win.  Rather, I have made it my life’s mission, at least intellectually, to almost never operate out of a binary framework, when dealing with contingent things.  The binary framework sees either black or white literary and metaphorically, either good or evil, rather than discerning shades of "more or less;" after all we are dealing with contingent things.

During this election cycle, I suggested that Catholics were stuck between a rock and a hard place, because both platforms departed from Catholic teaching in serious ways.  For me, it was not a choice between a good and a bad candidate, a good and bad platform.  At first I spoke in terms of a choice of the lesser of two evils, in a manner of speaking, but my moral theology colleague reminded me that Catholics can never choose evil.   In other words, despite their imperfection, a Catholic should choose what he or she saw as the better of the two seriously flawed platforms.  And so, I would agree that at election time, when the choice is between two candidates, after studying and praying over the issues, a Catholic is faced with a binary situation, in which he or she has to make a choice in conscience.

But apart from the actual choice in the booth, it seems clear to me that both platforms need to be put under greater scrutiny, to see how much they conform to the will of Christ as channelled through Church teaching.  And now after the election, the platform of the winner, which he intends to put into action, need even more thorough scrutiny.  I suspect that the Catholic Bishops Conference had two drafts of their congratulatory letter, for whichever candidate won.  While the contents of the two letters were probably the same, that middle paragraph that described the issues of contention between the Church and the candidate, was different.

My left-leaning friends seem by and large resigned to the fact that the Democrat platform differs from Catholic teaching in many ways; they usually want Catholic teaching to be changed to fit their ideology.  My right-leaning friends, however, seem to equate their candidate’s platform with orthodox Catholic teaching; if there is a lack of concordance between the two, it is the Catholic teaching that is heretical – it does not need to change – it has never been Catholic teaching.  In fact often the words orthodox and conservative are used as synonyms.  That is why any suggestion before the election that people choose according to their conscience was met with resistance, because it suggested that there could be any other morally right choice besides the conservative one.  That is why any suggestion that now after the election we have to dialogue with the newly elected leaders on any issue meets with consternation – what is there to dialogue about, they ask?

If in the past the Catholic priests and bishops have had some difficulty in convincing their left-leaning flock that many aspects of the Democrat platform, e.g. on abortion, marriage were at odds with Catholic teaching, now they have an even greater challenge in convincing their right-leaning ones that many aspects of the Republican platform, e.g. on immigration, refugees, capital punishment are similarly at odds with Catholic teaching.  I say this because of my own personal experience of pushback and that of my fellow priests this past week.  Several of us were called liberals for not speaking about abortion and for mentioning the "c" word, not "Clinton," but "conscience" on the Sunday before elections.  But I guess since Pope Francis has been called the same or worse, I am in good company.

Belonging in the same company as the Pope, however, does not ease my existential crisis!  My crisis remains because these sentiments are not coming from extremists such as those you find on lifesitenews.com or churchmilitant.com, but from ordinary, faithful, church-going Catholics – your lectors, ministers of communion, ushers and members of sodalities.  I have to wonder if are we experiencing in the Church the wider revolt of the rank and file against their leaders like we have seen in the US Republican Party and the UK Labour Party?

As I continue pondering my existential crisis, a practical question remains however.  What should I preach this first Sunday after the election?  Should I just say nothing about the elephant in the room (no pun intended) and just stick to the Scripture readings?  I am sure that my homiletics colleague would probably disagree because homilies are supposed to speak to the people's current situation and not about some pie in the sky.

What is a priest to do?