When the Catholic Church speaks up about politics, who is it who decides what to say?

One of the great gifts of being Catholic is a robust sense of the church as a corporate person, not only in the legal sense but also as the Body of Christ subsisting through history in the church’s visible institution. It is that sense that lets Catholics say and mean “Mother Church” and to cultivate a deep and personal love for the church even when, as Flannery O’Connor wrote to a friend who had converted to Catholicism, it can seem that we “have to suffer as much from the church as for it.”