Faithful citizenship requires Catholics to exercise their right to vote and uphold the teachings of their faith in voting. Pope Pius XII in 1946 spoke of the exercise of the right to vote as "an act of grave moral responsibility," arguing that "in the present circumstances" any Catholic who failed to vote due to weakness or laziness committed "a sin grave in itself, a mortal fault." This teaching of the Church is even more urgent today as we face serious issues and concerns in our country.
We Catholics in the U.S. are not first and foremost Republicans or Democrats. Nor are we first and foremost Americans, or citizens of whichever country in which we happen to be living. We are citizens of a higher country, and though we diligently obey all the just civil laws in the earthly cities where we live, we are always beholden to a higher law, and where the law of the earthly city conflicts with the law of the heavenly city, our loyalty is unswervingly due to the higher law.
This is the spirit with which a Catholic approaches the voting booth – not to bolster the career of his favorite politician or political party, or to advance some purely temporal political scheme, but to make Christ present in the temporal order. As Cardinal Ratzinger put it, "By fulfilling their civic duties, 'guided by a Christian conscience', in conformity with its values, the lay faithful exercise their proper task of infusing the temporal order with Christian values..."
In this age of great upheaval, when critical moral issues are at stake, it is more incumbent than ever that Christians heed the exhortations of the Church not to renege on their duties as citizens; let us approach the voting booths today armed with a clear knowledge of the issues and the moral truth, and let us pray fervently that the outcomes of the election lead to the protection of the true common good, above all through the protection of the pre-eminent issues of Catholic life and faith: protecting the sanctity of human life, especially the unborn who have no voice of their own, defending marriage and the family, and protecting our religious freedom.
As Pope Saint John Paul II said in Christifideles Laici, "Above all, 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."