Political Elections

POLITICAL ELECTIONS. - In a regime of representative democracy every citizen who has the requirements established by law is called to take part in the government of public affairs and to choose his own legislators by means of the political electoral vote, which is the expression of personal determination in the choice of the persons entrusted with exercising public power (for the history of the 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 highest importance, because it serves to replace organs essential to the life of the State and indispensable for the maintenance of social order and for the protection of the rights and interests of citizens. The Parliament that emerges from the electoral consultation makes the laws, on which depend the well-being or the misfortune of the national community, directs and controls the internal and external policy of the government, and attends to the supreme interests of the whole people and of individual citizens. A Parliament not made up of capable and honest persons and a bad government compromise the good of all.

To procure for society, as such, the good owed to it by its members and to prevent the evil opposed to it are the two integral acts of a special virtue, called social justice. Now justice holds a pre-eminent place over the other moral virtues; and among the different species of justice, social justice has the primacy, because the common good, its proper object, prevails over private good. The citizen, moreover, can violate social justice in two ways: 1) by not procuring for society the good owed to it (in our case, by abstaining from voting without just reason); 2) by causing it the opposite evil (by voting badly, that is, by abusing the vote).

But man does not belong only to civil society; he is also a member, by the positive will of God, of the Catholic Church. And as a citizen of this religious society he has the duty to protect its interests also by means of the political electoral vote. It is a very widespread prejudice that religion has nothing to do with political elections. The sophism is propagated by those who have an interest in deluding Catholics in order to garner votes; and it is believed by those who do not have an exact notion of the Catholic religion or do not reflect that today, in many countries and particularly in Italy, political parties do not have only programs of political technique more or less extraneous to religion, but inspire their action by principles, maxims, and ideologies which touch upon and even directly invade 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 extraneous to social life, but is a complex of doctrines, moral precepts, collective practices, institutions, and customs that have 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 having its own independent sphere of action; but distinction does not mean supersession. Politics must necessarily deal with many problems that concern Catholic life; and the Church inevitably encounters the State in the exercise of worship, in the protection of the health and unity of Christian families, in the education of Catholic youth, in the defense of public morality, 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 ends, sooner or later, in revolution, anarchy or slavery. Therefore the electoral vote, besides being a civic duty, as the Constitution of the Italian Republic sanctions (art. 48), is also a religious duty. And this explains and justifies the interest of the Pope, of the bishops, of the clergy and of Catholic Action in political elections. It depends in fact on those who reach Parliament and the government whether religion will be favored or persecuted, whether the spiritual mission of the Church will be facilitated or hindered, whether its legitimate rights will be respected or trampled upon; and it is enough to think of the very grave damages that bad laws and the hostile action of public authorities have brought in the past to the Church, to the clergy, to religious institutions, to Catholic schools, etc., to understand how many and what Catholic interests are connected with political elections.

Every citizen should be conscious of the value of his ballot, the symbol of his dignity as a politically free man, a guarantee of freedom even for the humblest, a powerful weapon of defense against the abuses of public powers, a necessary instrument for imposing his own 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 dispose of or not at one's own arbitrariness, deluding themselves that, by abstaining from voting, they do neither good nor harm. In reality a vote withheld by abstention from a good candidate automatically doubles the one given by another voter to the bad opposing candidate; so that abstaining from voting to the detriment of a good candidate is equivalent to voting for the bad candidate who is his opponent.

The gravity of the fault of one who abstains from voting without justified reason varies according to circumstances. As a general rule, to legitimize abstention a cause is required 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 are. In Italy, in the present circumstances, desertion from the political polls is in itself a grave fault. «In the present circumstances, Pius XII warned, it is a strict obligation for those who have the right, men and women, to take part in the elections. Whoever abstains from them, especially out of indolence or cowardice, commits of himself 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 districts, every antisocial and anti-Catholic member of Parliament owes his election to the absenteeism or the abuse of the vote on the part of Catholics themselves.

One must therefore vote, and vote according to conscience, that is, elect capable and honest candidates. In the aforementioned discourse Pius XII added: «Everyone has the duty to vote according to the dictates of his own conscience. And the voice of conscience imposes on every sincere Catholic the obligation to give his vote to those candidates or to that list of candidates who offer truly sufficient guarantees for the protection of the rights of God and of souls and for the true good of individuals, of families and of society, according to the law of God and Christian moral doctrine». Particular interests, whether individual or local, must be subordinated to the general good of the national community, and spiritual goods must hold primacy 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 done by his elected representatives in the exercise of their political mandate, and also contracts the obligation to make reparation for the damages that derive from it to the Church, to society, to families and to individual citizens. And the fault would be most grave if one were to vote for bad candidates with the intention of entrusting them with legislative power, in order to implement their antisocial and anti-Christian theories, such cooperation also involving adherence to perverse doctrines.

Even more responsible than the individual voter are those who during the electoral period carry on propaganda for a bad candidate or procure votes for him, deceiving the voters with false promises and intrigues or bribing 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 annulling votes regularly given to opposing candidates, or using other frauds and electoral malpractices. These persons commit a threefold grave injustice: one against the voter, who has the right to vote in full freedom; another against the candidate to whom that voter would have given his vote; the third against the good of the community, in whose service the vote was instituted.

All good citizens must with dignity defend the independence of their own conscience, resist every attempt at corruption, intimidation or violence, distrust the interested press, not allow themselves to be seduced by marketplace rhetoric, and make their forces converge compactly only upon those candidates who seem best to provide for the good of religion and of the fatherland.

Giuseppe Monti