POLITICAL ELECTIONS. — Under a system of representative democracy, every citizen who possesses the qualifications established by law is called upon to participate in the government of public affairs and to choose his own legislators by means of the political electoral vote, which is the expression of the individual determination in choosing the persons entrusted with exercising public authority (for the history of law and the technique of voting, V. voto).
The exercise of the vote is a public function, because it is performed by citizens for the good of the community; and it is of the greatest importance, because it serves to replace organs essential to the life of the State and indispensable for the maintenance of social order and the protection of the rights and interests of citizens. The Parliament emerging from the electoral consultation makes the laws on which the prosperity or misfortune
To procure for society, as such, the good owed to it by its members and to prevent the evil affecting it are the two integral acts of a special virtue called social justice. Now justice holds a pre-eminent place among the other moral virtues; and among the different kinds of justice, social justice has primacy, because the common good, its proper object, prevails over private good. A citizen can violate social justice in two ways: 1) by failing to procure for society the good owed to it (in the present case, by abstaining from voting without a just reason); 2) by causing it the opposite evil (by voting badly, that is, by abusing the vote).
But man belongs not only to civil society; he is also, by the positive will of God, a member of the Catholic Church. And as a citizen of this religious society, he has the duty to safeguard its interests also through the political electoral vote. It is a very widespread prejudice that religion has nothing to do with p. e. This sophism is propagated by those who have an interest in deceiving Catholics in order to seize their votes; and it is believed by those who have no exact notion of the Catholic religion or fail to reflect that today, in many countries and particularly in Italy, political parties have not only programmes of political technique more or less unrelated to religion, but base their activity on principles, maxims, and ideologies which touch upon and even directly contravene Christian doctrine and morality, the life of the Church, and the interests of Catholics. The Catholic religion is not an abstract belief or a practice of worship foreign to social life, but a complex of doctrines, moral precepts, collective practices, institutions, and customs that have continuous and necessary relations with the most important manifestations of public life. Religion and politics are certainly two specifically distinct categories, and State and Church are two powers, each having its own independent sphere of action; but distinction does not mean separation. Politics must necessarily concern itself with many problems relating to Catholic life; and the Church inevitably encounters the State in the exercise of worship, in safeguarding the health and unity of Christian families, in the education of Catholic youth, in the defence of public morality, and in the realization of Christian civilization. On the other hand, the teaching and action of the Church are necessary to the State: reason and experience show that the Catholic religion is the most powerful social force and the best guarantee of civil progress; whereas a people without religion sooner or later ends in revolution, anarchy, or slavery. Therefore the electoral vote, besides being a civic duty, as sanctioned by the Constitution of the Italian Republic (art. 48), is also a religious duty. This explains and justifies the concern of the Pope, the bishops, the clergy, and Catholic Action with p. e. Indeed, it depends on those who enter Parliament and government whether religion will be favoured or persecuted, whether the Church’s spiritual mission will be facilitated or obstructed, whether its legitimate rights will be respected or trampled upon; and one need only consider the extremely serious harm that bad laws and the hostile action of the public authorities have inflicted in the past upon the Church, the clergy, religious institutions, Catholic schools, etc., to understand how many and what Catholic interests are connected with p. e.
Every citizen should be conscious of the value of his ballot, a symbol of his dignity as a politically free man, a guarantee of freedom even for the humblest, a powerful weapon of defence against abuses by the public authorities, and a necessary instrument for imposing his will for the common good and for deciding the legislative direction of his country. Many, however, do not exercise the right to vote, considering it not a social function but a merely private and optional right, which one may or may not exercise at will, deceiving themselves that, by abstaining from voting, they do neither good nor evil. In reality, a vote withheld through abstention from a good candidate automatically doubles the vote cast by another elector for the bad opposing candidate; thus abstaining from voting to the detriment of a good candidate is equivalent to voting for his bad opponent.
The gravity of the guilt of one who abstains from voting without a justified reason varies according to the circumstances. As a general rule, to legitimize abstention, a cause is required that is all the more serious the more uncertain is the election of a good candidate and the more important are the civil, social, moral, and religious interests at stake in a given election. In Italy, under present circumstances, desertion of the political polls is in itself a grave fault. «In the present circumstances, Pius XII warned, it is a strict obligation for all who have the right, men and women, to take part in the elections. Whoever abstains from them, especially through indolence or cowardice, commits in itself a grave sin, a mortal fault». (Pius XII, Discorso ai parroci e ai quaresimalisti di Roma, 10 March 1948. Cf. Osservatore Romano, 11 March 1948). And Catholics must reflect that
in Italy, a country with a Catholic majority in all its electoral constituencies, every antisocial and anti-Catholic member of Parliament owes his election to absenteeism or to the abuse of the vote by Catholics themselves.
It is therefore necessary to vote, and to vote according to conscience, that is, to elect capable and honest candidates. In the discourse cited, Pius XII added: «Everyone has the duty to vote according to the dictates of his conscience. And the voice of conscience imposes upon every sincere Catholic the duty to give his vote to those candidates or to that list of candidates who offer truly sufficient guarantees for the safeguarding of the rights of God and souls and for the true good of individuals, families, and society, in accordance with God’s law and Christian moral doctrine». Particular, individual, or local interests must be subordinated to the general good of the national community, and spiritual goods must take precedence over material ones. Whoever knowingly and effectively votes for unworthy candidates commits a grave fault of cooperation in evil, assumes indirect responsibility for all the evil carried out by those elected in the exercise of their political mandate, and also incurs the obligation to make reparation for the harm thereby caused to the Church, society, families, and individual citizens. And the fault would be extremely grave if one voted for bad candidates with the intention of entrusting them with legislative power in order to put their antisocial and anti-Christian theories into practice, such cooperation also involving adherence to perverse doctrines.
Even more responsible than the individual voter are those who, during the electoral period, campaign for a bad candidate or procure votes for him, deceiving the electors with false promises and intrigues, or corrupting them with money or other material advantages, or spreading lies and calumnies against good candidates, or resorting to violence and threats to hinder the free exercise of the electoral right, or invalidating votes lawfully cast for opposing candidates, or employing other electoral frauds and abuses. Such men commit a threefold grave injustice: one against the elector, who has the right to vote with complete freedom; another against the candidate for whom that elector would have voted; and the third against the good of the community, in whose service the vote was instituted.
All good citizens must defend the independence of their conscience with dignity, resist every attempt at corruption, intimidation, or violence, beware of the interested press, not allow themselves to be seduced by demagogic rhetoric, and unite their forces resolutely behind only those candidates who seem best able to promote the good of religion and the fatherland.
BBL.: Cf. manuals of moral theology (Noldin-Schmitt, Prümmer, etc.); G. Monti, Il dovere elettorale, Rome 1945; G. Luzzi, Devo votare, Asti 1946. Giuseppe Monti