Pope Francis told American Catholics to vote their conscience. What did he mean?
A roll of "I Voted Today" stickers are pictured in a file photo.. (OSV News photo/Gary Cameron, Reuters)Pope Francis often makes headlines with in-flight press conferences at the end of papal trips, and his return to Rome from visiting Southeast Asia in September was no exception. Asked what advice he would give to Catholics in the United States for the upcoming presidential election, he minced no words in his assessment of the candidates: “Both are against life: the one that throws out migrants and the one that kills children. Both are against life.”
Nevertheless, he said, in response to a follow-up question about whether it was moral to vote for a candidate who supported abortion, that Catholics have a duty to “vote, and one has to choose the lesser evil.” He refused to speculate about which was the lesser evil, saying, “Each person must think and decide according to their own conscience.”
Some commentators interpreted the language of “lesser evil” as merely code to obscure a partisan preference, as if Catholics should automatically know which candidate is the lesser evil. Predictably, the candidate such commentators coded as “the lesser evil” was the one they already supported. Others described the pope’s answer as both-sidesism, as if he were drawing a lazy moral equivalence between the candidates rather than courageously speaking truth to power by specifying the lesser evil.
But both these assessments focus far too much on “lesser evil” and nowhere near enough on “according to their own conscience.” In telling American Catholics to vote according to their conscience, Pope Francis is not abandoning his supposed duty to make a moral judgment but rather is calling them to a deeper engagement with the moral challenges of this election.
An emphasis on conscience is not a recent innovation by Francis. Commenting in 1968 on a passage about conscience in the Second Vatican Council’s “Gaudium et Spes,” the Rev. Joseph Ratzinger, before being made a cardinal and later elected pope, said: “Over the pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority there still stands one’s own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority. Conscience confronts [the individual] with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one which in the last resort is beyond the claim of external social groups, even of the official church.”
Of course, appeals to conscience can be made cheaply, and many will point out that conscience must be both formed and informed in light of the teaching of the church. But just as “lesser evil” is not code for automatically choosing one party over the other, neither is “formed and informed” code for the demands of conscience being identical for all Catholics in all circumstances. As Pope Francis wrote in his apostolic exhortation “Amoris Laetitia,” the church is “called to form consciences, not to replace them” (No. 37).
Catholics in the United States, then, should hear Pope Francis’ assessment of the two major party candidates both as advice for the formation of conscience and as a refusal to replace it with a judgment pre-approved by the church. Rather than throwing up their hands and acting as if the pope has said, “Vote for whomever you wish,” Catholic voters need to reason, reflect and pray to hear the voice of conscience clearly. They need to do so especially if their conscience may be calling them to vote differently than their own longstanding habits, narrow self-interest or partisan preferences might suggest. In the depths of their conscience, God may surprise them.
In 2020, America’s editors, departing from a longstanding practice of commenting primarily on policies rather than candidates, registered a then-unprecedented warning that Donald J. Trump presented a unique threat to the constitutional order. In that editorial, we wrote that America’s commentary on elections had always been governed by two considerations: “the moral character of political decisions in light of Catholic principles and the necessity of preserving the American constitutional order.”
The editors now reiterate, as we have done repeatedly since 2020, our overriding concern about Mr. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge constraints on his own power, accept his 2020 electoral defeat or commit to respecting the outcome of the 2024 election. But we also recognize that those few voters who are still undecided at this point do not consider concerns about basic commitments to democracy determinative in themselves or perhaps are struggling in conscience with other moral issues that they may consider similarly weighty.
Thus, following Pope Francis’ example, we offer here what we hope will be a help toward the formation of conscience. Rather than a claim to know conscience’s demands for everyone, it is a challenge for voters to engage in deeper reflection, prayer and dialogue.
While many moral issues are involved in this election, Pope Francis focused on two, migration and abortion. America has a long tradition of commentary on both.
Founded in 1909, America addressed itself both to Catholic readers, many of whom were recent immigrants, and to a broader public that was skeptical of their integration into American life. An article in 1922 made the case that anti-immigrant prejudice was itself contrary to American values, concluding with the hope that fellow citizens would recognize that “the menace to national unity is native to the soil, and that it is the native-born American who does not uphold the principles of the Constitution or the intent of its framers.”
While Americans may disagree in good conscience about the proper levels of immigration and how to regulate it, no just or moral policy can be built on racist, nativist fear-mongering.
Similarly, concern for the recognition of common humanity is at the heart of Catholic opposition to abortion. In 2022, responding to the Dobbs decision, we wrote that “unborn human life is deserving of legal protection through restrictions on abortion, which must be accompanied by protections for pregnant women and support to make it possible to welcome a child in economic security.”
While Americans may disagree in good conscience about the right way to structure laws to recognize the unique interrelationship of human life in the womb and the bodily autonomy of pregnant women, no just or moral policy can be built on the wholesale rejection of legal protection for the unborn.
These considerations—about democracy and human dignity, about immigration and abortion—do not establish a universal calculus to be applied in the voting booth this November. Nor should anyone speaking on behalf of the church pretend that decisions at the ballot box can be reduced to a tally of various positions held by candidates or a utilitarian calculation about how many lives are likely to be risked or saved.
The prudential consideration of which candidates are more trustworthy, of which concerns are more pressing, of which bad and good policies are more likely to be adopted, and of how this election will affect our civic and moral dialogue going forward belongs to voters in the integrity of their consciences.
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