POLITICAL ELECTIONS. — In a system of representative democracy, every citizen who meets the legal requirements is called upon to participate in the governance of the public realm and to choose their legislators through the political electoral vote, which is the expression of personal determination in selecting those entrusted with exercising public power (for the history of law and the technique of voting, V. VOTO).
The exercise of the vote is a public function, as it is carried out by citizens for the good of the community; and it is of the utmost importance, because it serves to replace essential organs for the life of the State and indispensable for maintaining social order and safeguarding the rights and interests of citizens. The Parliament resulting from the electoral consultation enacts the laws upon which the well-being or misfortune of the national community depends, directs and controls the domestic and foreign policy of the government, and attends to the supreme interests of the entire people and of individual citizens. A Parliament composed of incapable or dishonest individuals and a poor government compromise the good of all.
Securing for society, as such, the good due to it from its members and preventing its harm are the two integral acts of a special virtue called social justice. Now justice holds a preeminent place among the other moral virtues; among the various kinds of justice, social justice has primacy, because the common good, its proper object, takes precedence over private good. A citizen can then violate social justice in two ways: 1) by failing to secure for society the good due to it (in our case, abstaining from voting without just cause); 2) by causing it the opposite harm (by voting poorly, i.e., abusing the vote).
But man does not belong solely to civil society; he is also, by God’s positive will, a member of the Catholic Church. And as a citizen of this religious society, he has the duty to safeguard its interests, including through the political electoral vote. A very widespread prejudice holds that in political elections religion has nothing to do with II. This sophistry is propagated by those who have an interest in deceiving Catholics in order to garner their votes; and it is believed by those who lack a precise notion of the Catholic religion or who do not reflect that today, in many countries—and particularly in Italy—the political parties do not merely have programs of political technique that are more or less extraneous to religion, but rather inspire their actions with principles, maxims, and ideologies that directly touch and impinge upon Christian doctrine and morality, the life of the Church, and the interests of Catholics. The Catholic religion is not an abstract belief or a form of worship extraneous to social life, but rather a complex of doctrines, moral precepts, collective practices, institutions, and customs that maintain incessant 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 possessing its own sphere of independent action; but distinction does not mean separation. Politics necessarily concerns itself with many problems that affect Catholic life; and the Church unavoidably intersects with the State in the exercise of worship, in safeguarding the sanctity and unity of Christian families, in the education of Catholic youth, in the defense of public morality, and in the realization of Christian civilization. On the other hand, the teaching and action of the Church are necessary for the State: reason and experience demonstrate that the Catholic religion is the most powerful social force and the best guarantee of civil progress; whereas, by contrast, 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. And this explains and justifies the interest of the Pope, the bishops, the clergy, and Catholic Action in political elections.
For it is upon those who reach Parliament and government that it depends whether religion will be favored or persecuted, whether the spiritual mission of the Church will be facilitated or hindered, and whether its legitimate rights will be respected or trampled upon; and it is enough to consider the most serious harm that bad laws and hostile actions by public authorities have in the past inflicted upon the Church, the clergy, religious institutions, Catholic schools, etc., to understand how many and what Catholic interests are at stake in political elections.
Every citizen should be conscious of the value of their ballot paper, a symbol of their dignity as a politically free person, a guarantee of freedom even for the humblest, a powerful weapon for defending against abuses of public power, and a necessary instrument for imposing their will for the common good and for determining the legislative direction of their country. Many, however, fail to exercise the right to vote, regarding it not as a social function but as a merely private and optional right, which one may exercise or not at will, deluding themselves that by abstaining from voting they do neither good nor harm. In reality, a vote withheld from a good candidate automatically doubles the vote given by another elector to the opposing bad candidate; thus, abstention from voting to the detriment of a good candidate is equivalent to voting for the bad candidate opposing him.
The gravity of the fault of one who abstains from voting without just cause varies according to circumstances. As a general rule, to justify abstention a cause must be all the more grave the more uncertain the election of a good candidate is and the more important the civil, social, moral, and religious interests at stake in a given vote. In Italy, under present circumstances, abstention from the political polls is in itself a grave fault. “Under 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 doing so, especially out of laziness or cowardice, commits a grave sin, a mortal sin” (Pius XII, Address to Parish Priests and Lenten Preachers of Rome, March 10, 1948. Cf. *Osservatore Romano*, March 11, 1948). Catholics must reflect that in Italy, a country with a Catholic majority in all its electoral districts, every anti-social and anti-Catholic member of Parliament owes his election to the abstention or abuse of the vote by Catholics themselves.
Therefore, one must vote, and vote according to conscience—that is, elect capable and honest candidates. In the same discourse, Pius XII added: “Everyone has the duty to vote according to the dictates of their conscience. And the voice of conscience imposes upon every sincere Catholic the obligation to give their vote to those candidates or that list of candidates who offer truly sufficient guarantees for the defense of the rights of God and of souls and for the true good of individuals, families, and society, in accordance with the law of God and Christian moral doctrine.” Particular 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 sin of cooperation in evil, assumes indirect responsibility for all the harm done by those elected in the exercise of their political mandate, and also contravenes the obligation to make reparation for the damage thereby inflicted upon the Church, society, families, and individual citizens. And the fault would be all the graver if one were to vote for bad candidates with the intention of entrusting them with legislative power in order to implement their anti-social and anti-Christian theories, in which case such cooperation would also entail adherence to perverse doctrines.
More responsible still than the individual voter are those who, during the electoral period, campaign for a bad candidate or procure votes for him, deceiving 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 right to vote, or annulling votes regularly cast for opposing candidates, or employing other electoral frauds and rigging. These persons commit a threefold grave injustice: one against the elector who has the right to vote with full freedom, another against the candidate to whom that elector would have given his vote, the third against the common good, in the service of which the vote was instituted.
All good citizens must uphold with dignity the independence of their conscience, resist every attempt at corruption, intimidation or violence, be wary of partisan press, not be seduced by the demagogic rhetoric of the hustings, and concentrate their united strength only on those candidates who seem best able to provide for the good of religion and of the fatherland.