Aren't there 13 Non-Negotiables, not just 5?

[manualman]

BC, The root problem you seem to be getting at here is “Why doesn’t the Church simply tell us who to vote for?” The answer is because they learned the HARD way that its not good for the church to hold that kind of temporal power. It encourages the wrong sort of people to enter ecclesial service for the wrong sorts of reasons.

Instead, the church teaching in broad, complex and nuanced principles that are brutally hard for us average Joe sixpacks to fully comprehend. The problem with this approach is that unscrupulous political factions can easily distort and skew the actual church teachings in favor or their pet political candidates to the point where the regular people in the pew don’t know WHAT to believe.

I suspect the “Five Non-negotiables” are an attempt to specifically apply the broader church guidelines to the circumstance in America in this particular era to try to reduce the confusion. For example, an awful lot of pro-abortion politicians have pandered to catholics for years by appealing to their “committment to the poor” (by which they actually mean their own particular vision of massive government programs calculated to create armies of reliable voting blocs for their party among both the employees of said behemoth and the dependent beneficiaries of the program). They’ve long made the implicit argument that their social justice service offset problems catholics might have with their abortion position making them a net wash with the ‘heartless’ candidate on the other ticket!

The church guidance, if you really read it, clearly refutes this sort of dishonest trickery by instructing the faithful to prioritize issues according to their “proportionate impact” on humanity. Whoever compiled the “5” clearly was merely attempting to blow away the smokescreen by which politicians attempted to conceal the difference between means of assistance to the poor and slaughtering millions of innocent unborn! (for example).

Surely you aren’t arguing that legal contraception has a proportionate impact on society on scale with legal abortion or euthanasia? The pamphlet has NOTHING to do with which teachings or doctrines are “negotiable” but which issues have so much potential impact on society and culture that when you apply the detailed teachings of the church to actual society today, these 5 rise to the top in priority.

 

[Bartolome_Casas]

There’s no dogma of the Catholic Faith saying that prostitution must be illegal. It may be immoral, yes, and it’s certainly wrong to promote it, but both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that it’s permissible for the civil authority to* tolerate* it, in order to prevent still-worse debaucheries.

Somehow that doesn’t sound right. Not everything that Augustine and Aquinas wrote became Church teaching. Sometime I’d like to find out what the Church’s actual teaching on all this is.

 

[Bartolome_Casas]

Your analysis of that quote is not accurate. You assert that it is unjust based on an erroneous position. First not all issues are at play in each election. Secondly, unequals must be treated unequally. That is a matter of justice.

Redefining marriage has a much greater impact on civilization than civil divorce as one example.

I believe the facts tell a different story. The effects of widespread no-fault divorce on civilization have been devastating. What effect will gay marriage have it becomes more widespread? There are so few gays, and so few of them will ever get married? So how could this harm all the heterosexuals, who will always hugely be in the majority? Gays make up 1 or 2 percent, and that will never change? Is there some idea out there that gay-ness is catchy?

No-fault divorce and remarriage already IS a redefining of marriage. True marriage, real marriage is defined as:

“a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life.”

That’s from para 1601 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. scborromeo.org/ccc/p2s2c3a7.htm

The State already redefined marriage, as IMPERMANENT union, or a union with permanence optional (its a sort of PRO-CHOICE law regarding lifelong marriage). That perversion of marriage law happened 40 or so years ago. That was already an unprecedented, RADICAL redefining of marriage, and the consequences on the American and Europe societies have been CATASTROPHIC. This catastrophe has been going on for 40 years now.

Now gays and liberals want to redefine further the already radically redefined marriage. The opponents of gay marriage don’t want to return to true marriage. They just want to return to the earlier radically redefined marriage. Thus, things like the Defend Marriage Act are a joke, unless the whole point is just to hate gays. Gay marriage is impossible and a perversion. But so is no-fault divorce and remarriage. Our so-called conservative movement is not conservative at all, but just an anti-gay liberal movement, or perhaps, “libertarian” would be the better term. There’s no significant movement to restore true marriage in the USA.

The relevance to all this to this THREAD is that it shows how false and misleading the “5 Non-Negotiables” are as a supposed Catholic way to evaluable candidates for public office. It show that the lay Catholics who invented and promoted the “5 Non-Negotiables” are very selective about which sins they want to call out as sins and fights against in the culture and public arena.

 

[Bartolome_Casas]

Where do you get the authority to post here? Yet if you post something with sound logic, or properly reference Church teach others may learn. The same is true with Catholic Answers, which has a lot more than just the booklet. However, they are not without authority. They are an official apostolate that is registered in their diocese. Their ministry has the approval to the local bishop

The whole point of the Catholic Answers organization is that, while some or many other Catholics will give their personal theological opinions INSTEAD of what the Church really teaches, the apologists of Catholic Answers will never do that, and will ONLY teach what the Church’s official magisterium teachers.

With its voter guide, Catholic Answers seem to have violated its own chief principle. With its voter’s guide, it devised a personal, private way of evaluating candidates for public office, a way that is significantly DIFFERENT from what the pope and the bishops teach. The Catholic Answers voting guide misled ME, because for a long time I really thought that the CHURCH teaches that there are 5 Non-Negotiable issues, when that is SIMPLY NOT SO. The Church has never taught that. NEVER! That seems like a problem to me.

Yes, I write comments on the Forum, but I never pretend to be an authority that anyone should follow. No one quotes me, Bartolome, as an authority.

The apologists of Catholic Answers have legitimacy and credibility only as long as they teach only what the official magisterium of the Church teaches. When they veer off into teaching and advocating for their own special views, they are no better than all the dissenters they criticize all the time.

 

[Bartolome_Casas]

The debate is about religious liberty not the prohibition of drugs. You cannot ban drugs with illicit uses as all drugs may have illicit uses.

The fight over HHS Mandate is ALL about the morality of the use of birth control devices! Just go and get copies of the lawsuits filed by Catholic hospitals and Catholic universities, and read what their lawsuit filings say. They say that these Catholic institution aren’t suing because federal law requires them to cover diabetes medications, or blood transfusions. The whole basis of these lawsuits is that the use of birth control pills is an “intrinsic evil” which should be illegal as it was in the State of Connecticut prior to the Supreme Court decision of 1965.

Religious liberty is NOT liberty to sin. It is the freedom to obey the moral law. We Catholics are not pro-choice on morality. We don’t say “Give me liberty or give me death.” That’s the credo of the Founding Fathers of 1776. We Catholics instead have a Father in Heaven, to whom we say, “Heavenly father, not my will be done, but your will.”

The root problem is not the HHS Mandate, but that birth control devices and pills are legal at all in the U.S. The Church teaches that the use and sale of them should be illegal.

 

[manualman]

I believe the facts tell a different story. The effects of widespread no-fault divorce on civilization have been devastating. What effect will gay marriage have it becomes more widespread? There are so few gays, and so few of them will ever get married? So how could this harm all the heterosexuals, who will always hugely be in the majority? Gays make up 1 or 2 percent, and that will never change? Is there some idea out there that gay-ness is catchy?

Good question and the answer is quite simple. “No fault divorce” was devastating because it implicitly changed the definition of what marriage IS in the larger culture in which we live and that shapes our worldview (whether we want it to or not!). We lost that battle and the culture has slid down the slope of debasing the very concept of what marriage is.

Similarly, contraception devastated our culture by altering the meaning of marriage from one in which the relationship was in large part defined by its inherent orientation towards making babies to one in which children were optional and largely irrelevant to the basic meaning of marriage.

General societal acceptance of “gay marriage” is yet one more stage in the slide down the muddy slope into the moral ditch because it still more strongly than contraception declares the irrelevance of procreation to the fundamental meaning and identity of marriage. If two people who, by their very nature are sterile (i.e. two men)can be “just as married” as a man and woman then procreation IS irrelevant to the definition of marriage. Culture MATTERS in human society. No man is an island, we are a community of persons.

Unlike divorce and contraception, the general culture hasn’t yet totally swallowed this lie yet. We can never get our culture back up the slope until we FIRST stop the sliding! Surely anybody can see that? This is why stopping the slide is a priority over climbing back up the hill.

 

[Bartolome_Casas]

Good question and the answer is quite simple. “No fault divorce” was devastating because it implicitly changed the definition of what marriage IS in the larger culture in which we live and that shapes our worldview (whether we want it to or not!). We lost that battle and the culture has slid down the slope of debasing the very concept of what marriage is.

Similarly, contraception devastated our culture by altering the meaning of marriage from one in which the relationship was in large part defined by its inherent orientation towards making babies to one in which children were optional and largely irrelevant to the basic meaning of marriage.

General societal acceptance of “gay marriage” is yet one more stage in the slide down the muddy slope into the moral ditch because it still more strongly than contraception declares the irrelevance of procreation to the fundamental meaning and identity of marriage. If two people who, by their very nature are sterile (i.e. two men)can be “just as married” as a man and woman then procreation IS irrelevant to the definition of marriage. Culture MATTERS in human society. No man is an island, we are a community of persons.

Unlike divorce and contraception, the general culture hasn’t yet totally swallowed this lie yet. We can never get our culture back up the slope until we FIRST stop the sliding! Surely anybody can see that? This is why stopping the slide is a priority over climbing back up the hill.

Good point. Just as long as we don’t fall into the big lie that all we have to do is stop and reverse this gay marriage movement and then everything will be okay. And just as long as we don’t get bamboozled by manipulative politicos who don’t care one iota about marriage or the culture or God and just want to use this gay marriage issue as a “wedge issue” to catapult themselves and their cronies into the power (and potential personal wealth) that comes with public office.

 

[manualman]

Yes! It is REALLY important that catholics take care to make the guidance of their faith set their political priorities, above political affiliations based on other factors.

Frankly, catholicism is in a mess right now in no small part precisely because we failed to keep that separation 70 years ago when it was a “no-brainer” for catholics to support the party of the “little guy.” That was, of course, long before that party because the party of KILLING the little guys…

Catholic Answer’s guide is by no means going to be useful or relevant in 50 years (or, say, 100 years ago). It is a boiled down and simplified guide tailored to TODAY’s conditions and issues evaluated according to church teaching.

 

[Bartolome_Casas]

Yes! It is REALLY important that catholics take care to make the guidance of their faith set their political priorities, above political affiliations based on other factors.

Frankly, catholicism is in a mess right now in no small part precisely because we failed to keep that separation 70 years ago when it was a “no-brainer” for catholics to support the party of the “little guy.” That was, of course, long before that party because the party of KILLING the little guys…

Catholic Answer’s guide is by no means going to be useful or relevant in 50 years (or, say, 100 years ago). It is a boiled down and simplified guide tailored to TODAY’s conditions and issues evaluated according to church teaching.

I keep thinking is that what we Catholics REALLY NEED is NOT voting guides, but one or more political parties that declares that it will always support the pro-life and social doctrine teachings of the Catholic Church. I’m sick of there being no party and not movement that is fully Catholic in its values.

There have been Catholicism-based political parties in the past. There was the Center Party for many years in Germany. It was a Catholicism-based party, though you didn’t have to be Catholic to be a member. It existed until the Nazis banned it. Even the great uncle of the current pope was involved in the Center Party. See:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_Party_(Germany

newadvent.org/cathen/16020b.htm

That’s what we Catholics REALLY need. Why should we have to keep compromising our Catholic values by being forced to pick between the Party of Godless Mammon and the Party of the Godless Golden Calf?

Neither of the two major existing parties will legislate in favor of:

-Indissolvable marriage
-Banning birth control devices
-Banning adultery
-Banning pre-marital sex
-Banning pornography

 

[Linux]

We have enough trouble getting Catholics to acknowledge FIVE non-negotiable issues for voting, let alone 13 or more! Not that we should stop trying to educate malformed consciences, but that we recognize that just having Catholics vote from the 5 non-negotiables would change the political climate in this country in a HUGE way! It’s a question of priorities.

I think the problem is not that some Catholics don’t accept the moral teachings of the Church, but rather some of us including my self don’t feel that any government can legitimately enforce a sanction against gay marriage, abortion, condom use, etc, in a pluralistic society without forcing ones faith or religious beliefs on society. It is also a sin to practice any other religious faith other than the Catholic Faith. Should the American government therefore criminalise any other expression of religious faith that is not catholic?

Believing that something is wrong cannot be the only bases for it being illegal

There is another issue here. The fact that one political party is against abortion does not mean they can overturn the right to abortion and neither does it mean that they do not support other intrinsic evils. So it is not as simple as voting for a party that happens to hold values that reflect the values of our faith. Voting for them because they are against abortion does not some how absolve us if they are in fact supporting other intrinsic evils. If they are supporting other intrinsic evils then that means we are in some shape or form acting against our faith; that is if you don’t believe in choosing the lesser of two evils, an idea which some Catholics I have debated on this issue seem willing to reject if it doesn’t favour their agenda. It is an intrinsic evil to place profit over the common good, to place the wants of the market place before the needs of the poor. This is also non-negotiable. Lack of proper health care is an intrinsic evil. But I do not see the Catholics in America making a big huff and puff about that. In fact I see them using abortion and gay marriage as an excuse to prevent changes in those areas.

The Point is, just because a political party is against abortion, does not mean that they are the right people to vote for. Neither is it necessarily wrong to vote for a party that is for abortion rights if it can be shown that they represent the lesser of two evils in light of the other issues they support in contrast to opposing parties.

I think that voting for a party merely because they are against abortion can be a sin if the other things they support does not reflect the moral dignity of human beings.

 

[Listener]

I don’t know what the ultimate origin of the 5 Non-Negotiables list is.

But Catholic Answers presents the 5 Non-Negotiables in its voters guide. Go to pages 3, 4 and 5 of the following PDF web page:
catholic.com/sites/default/files/voters_guide_for_serious_catholics.pdf

This Catholic Answers voter guide presents the whole 5 Non-Negotiables approach as if it is obvious or an official Catholic Church doctrine. But is it? I don’t know. But I don’t think so. Anyway, I am trying to learn about this.

Who said that there are ONLY FIVE non-negotiable intrinsic evils? Who decided this? Are Catholics bound to accept this view? Who said that this is the only way to judge candidates for public office?

Are we to conclude that the people at Catholics Answers think that the legality of birth control devices IS NEGOTIABLE? Use of birth control devises IS an intrinsic evil, and they formerly were illegal in some states of the U.S.

I agree with you. I believe that there are a whole lot more than 5 non-negotiable intrinsic evils, and torture is one of them. It is interesting to note that the word “non-negotiable” does not appear in the Catholic Catechism.

What I don’t agree with is that we should have secular laws against all of these things. Do you want the Church all tangled up with government and politics like it was in the Middle Ages? Some say it has to be a mortal sin to vote for a “pro-choice” candidate. I think that is nonsense. A mortal sin requires full knowledge. We hardly have full knowledge because we can’t read the other person’s mind. Is the candidate really pro-choice, or is that what they say they are today. Many candidates are pro-choice one year, and they change to pro-life the next year just because they happen to be running as a Republican candidate. Many times, if the election is a local one, it is impossible to figure out which they are because they don’t mention it on their Web Site. If you do find out that a candidate is pro-choice, you usually find out that his or her opponent is also pro-choice. The bottom line is that many times you have to either vote for a pro-choice candidate or refrain from voting. The Catechism does say that we are obliged as citizens to vote, so I think that means we will very likely be voting for pro-choice people if we vote. It is our job to decide which candidate will do the least amount of damage, and different people will decide differently.

 

[TheRealJuliane]

I think the problem is not that some Catholics don’t accept the moral teachings of the Church, but rather some of us including my self don’t feel that any government can legitimately enforce a sanction against gay marriage, abortion, condom use, etc, in a pluralistic society without forcing ones faith or religious beliefs on society. It is also a sin to practice any other religious faith other than the Catholic Faith. Should the American government therefore criminalise any other expression of religious faith that is not catholic?

Believing that something is wrong cannot be the only bases for it being illegal

There is another issue here. The fact that one political party is against abortion does not mean they can overturn the right to abortion and neither does it mean that they do not support other intrinsic evils. So it is not as simple as voting for a party that happens to hold values that reflect the values of our faith. Voting for them because they are against abortion does not some how absolve us if they are in fact supporting other intrinsic evils. If they are supporting other intrinsic evils then that means we are in some shape or form acting against our faith; that is if you don’t believe in choosing the lesser of two evils, an idea which some Catholics I have debated on this issue seem willing to reject if it doesn’t favour their agenda. It is an intrinsic evil to place profit over the common good, to place the wants of the market place before the needs of the poor. This is also non-negotiable. Lack of proper health care is an intrinsic evil. But I do not see the Catholics in America making a big huff and puff about that. In fact I see them using abortion and gay marriage as an excuse to prevent changes in those areas.

The Point is, just because a political party is against abortion, does not mean that they are the right people to vote for.** Neither is it necessarily wrong to vote for a party that is for abortion rights if it can be shown that they represent the lesser of two evils in light of the other issues they support in contrast to opposing parties.**

I think that voting for a party merely because they are against abortion can be a sin if the other things they support does not reflect the moral dignity of human beings.

Wrong. The killing of a baby in its mother’s womb trumps ALL other issues because unless you can live, you can HAVE no other rights. You’re doing what Catholics do - rationalizing your vote for a party that has betrayed our faith again and again, in so many ways. And continues to betray us, through the HHS legislation.

 

[Tighty_Whitey]

The fight over HHS Mandate is ALL about the morality of the use of birth control devices! Just go and get copies of the lawsuits filed by Catholic hospitals and Catholic universities, and read what their lawsuit filings say. They say that these Catholic institution aren’t suing because federal law requires them to cover diabetes medications, or blood transfusions. The whole basis of these lawsuits is that the use of birth control pills is an “intrinsic evil” which should be illegal as it was in the State of Connecticut prior to the Supreme Court decision of 1965.

Religious liberty is NOT liberty to sin. It is the freedom to obey the moral law. We Catholics are not pro-choice on morality. We don’t say “Give me liberty or give me death.” That’s the credo of the Founding Fathers of 1776. We Catholics instead have a Father in Heaven, to whom we say, “Heavenly father, not my will be done, but your will.”

The root problem is not the HHS Mandate, but that birth control devices and pills are legal at all in the U.S. The Church teaches that the use and sale of them should be illegal.

I disagree with this argument vis-a-vis the issue at hand which is the whether or not a Catholic can vote for a candidate that is either in favor of permitting the sale of birth control or expresses no objection to the legal sale of birth control. This is a different inquiry than determining whether a candidate supports religious freedom or, conversely, supports the infringement upon religious freedom that is the crux of the argument pertaining to the HHS mandate.

I really don’t see why a Catholic politician would have to advocate for legislation banning the sale of birth control. The Church’s teaching on the use of birth control is clear and all Catholics are individually responsible to be guided by such. In case you haven’t noticed there are hundreds of millions of non-Catholics living the in the U.S. and a Catholic politician is not required to ensure that Catholicism is enacted into legislation.

 

[pnewton]

But the pope and the U.S. bishops have both put out their own guidelines for Catholics to use for voting, and the guidelines of the popes and the bishops are radically different from this “5 Non-Negotiables” approach promoted by Catholic Answers. .

Radically different??? Why?

Can you point out one thing in this voter’s guide that is contrary to Church teaching?

As to the HHS mandate, that was not an issue when the booklet was published, or when it was updated in 2006.

While we are at it, can you find one politician that supports abortion, but is opposed to contraception?

Thus, if you want to have higher standards, nothing in the guide suggests you can’t. Simply don’t vote if that is what you believe.

I personally think you are fixated too much on the term, the brand name, as it were. The point of the guide is that areas of grave mortal sin that come up as issues in debates and campaigns need to eliminate that candidate, if there are other moral viable options.

While we are at it, can you show anywhere a politician in an election in the last couple of decades has come out opposed to the legalization of contraception?

 

[pnewton]

I keep thinking is that what we Catholics REALLY NEED is NOT voting guides, but one or more political parties that declares that it will always support the pro-life and social doctrine teachings of the Catholic Church. I’m sick of there being no party and not movement that is fully Catholic in its values.

Neither of the two major existing parties will legislate in favor of:

-Indissolvable marriage
-Banning birth control devices
-Banning adultery
-Banning pre-marital sex
-Banning pornography

You are right. It would be great. One is certainly capable of voting third party because they are very strict on all issues. I have done this frequently. I think having a candidate that supports all the above list is unrealistic. Have you heard of any?

 

[Linux]

Wrong. The killing of a baby in its mother’s womb trumps ALL other issues because unless you can live, you can HAVE no other rights.

This is wrong, and can be shown to be wrong with a simple analogy. The blue party is against abortion but is also in favour of nuking a population centre of one billion people for no good reason accept as a military exercise. The red party permits abortion but rejects the plans for the military exercise.

The right person to vote for is obviously the red party, because they represent the lesser of two evils. The fact that abortion is an intrinsic evil is irrelevant if the political reality that people are born into does not reflect the moral dignity of human life in every respect; not just when they are in the womb. The analogy shows that there is no necessary evil in voting for a political party that happens to make a distinction between abortion and murder.

If the conservative party does not support values that respect the dignity of people living outside of the womb, then I don’t see the moral obligation to vote for them merely because they are against abortion. That would be a sin if they support other intrinsic evils that outweigh the good of voting for another party that might also be for abortion. Also the legal permission of abortion does not mean that people will have abortions. It just means that people will not be criminalised for doing so.

Its not as black and white as you would wish to make it out to be.

 

[pnewton]

Wrong. The killing of a baby in its mother’s womb trumps ALL other issues because unless you can live, you can HAVE no other rights.

The Church has said it is acceptable to vote for someone who accepts legalized abortion if it is for proportionate reasoning. I have yet to see an issue that is proportionate to it, but the principle remains. Abortion is not “first” because you can have no other rights until you are born. It is the first (in my opinion) because it stands on the edge of a knife and is the greatest evil currently allowed in the country.

 

[someperson555]

but this list is NOT a guide which political candidate to vote for. I have not read anywhere that its infallibly defined that a catholic cant vote for a candidate who supports gay marriage. there is a separation of church and state thus i dont think the infallible magisterium ever made such a prohibition on voting for gay marriage.
abortion is a diffrent matter, since it is murder and infringes upon thje rghts ofd the unborn.
but gay marriage doesnt affect the church whatsoever.

 

[lynnvinc]

The current 5 Non-Negotiables is a list of acts that are intrinsic evils according to the infallible magisterium of the Catholic Church.

These are the intrinsic evils on the current 5 Non-Negotiables list:

(1) Abortion
(2) Euthanasia
(3) Embryonic Stem Cell Research
(4) Human Cloning
(5) Homosexual “marriage”…

To me killing people (whether unborn or born) is a non-negotiable, and the unborn whether thru medical abortions or poison or other means. This seems to me the more important non-negotiable.

 

[Bartolome_Casas]

Wrong. The killing of a baby in its mother’s womb trumps ALL other issues…

I heartily agree with that.

What drives me to almost sinful DESPAIR is that there is no major political party that believes, to use the phrase of TheRealJuliane, that anti-abortion “trumps ALL other issues.”

If there was a major party that believed that anti-abortion “trumps ALL other issues,” the insidious Roe vs. Wade would be by now be as dead as the insidious Dred Scott Decision (in which the Supreme Court held that African-Americans were not citizens and so had no rights under the Constitution).

It’s one thing to put anti-abortion in a party platform. Its another thing to work in public office as it anti-abortion “trumps ALL other issues.”

This is why I feel that we need a new party which will plainly say that anti-abortion “trumps ALL other issues,” and then act that way when they get into office.

I just think we cannot continue to be part of some cynical “500 Year Plan” to re-criminalize abortion. That is just a farce and a joke.

The trains are still running to Auschwitz, for unborn children. What political office holder will talk that way?

So-called pro-life office holders and candidates, when they act like it is okay if it takes another 20, 30, 40, 50 or some unknown number of years to get rid of legal abortion, implicitly confirm the ideology of the “pro-choicers” that a fetus is not really a full human being. Anyone who sees and really believes that human fetuses are full human being could never be content for it to take another 50, 100, or 500 years for legal abortion to be abolished, just as no Jewish person could be content for the trains to still be running to Auschwitz.

I don’t believe we can or should trust the words of people in either major party. Rather, we must look at their ACTIONS and INACTION. As President Ronald Reagan said, when speaking of dealing with the “evil empire” (USSR), “trust but verify.” Sadly, Original Sin is alive and well in both major parties, and in me and you. The men and women in both major parties lack the innocence of Adam and Eve before the Fall, lack the innocence of the Holy Angels. Lance Armstrong is not the only fraudster in the world. There are innumerable Lance Armstrongs all over place, particularly in high offices and high estates, but, also in low offices and low estates. When someone called Him “good,” Jesus rebuked the man (who could not see His Divinity) and replied, " ‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone." (Mark 10:18) To me, we need to stop divinizing worldly political parties and worldly political parties that have no commitment to upholding the Holy Catholic Faith.