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HagiaSophia
Guest
Then, in early 2004, an El Cajon, Calif.-based conservative group, “Catholic Answers,” published its “Voter’s Guide for Serious Catholics,” a 2,500-word pamphlet that urged Catholics to vote based on the “five nonnegotiable issues.” Said the pamphlet, “It is a serious sin to deliberately endorse or promote any of these actions, and no candidate who really wants to advance the common good will support any action contrary to the nonnegotiable principles involved in these issues.”
Pamphlets in parking lots
In the outreach effort that ensued, the diocesan social action directors were blindsided. Millions of copies of the “Voter’s Guide for Serious Catholics” were distributed in church parking lots and foyers and inserted in parish bulletins. Catholic Answers took out a full-page ad in USA Today, and proponents of the nonnegotiables disrupted efforts to promote the bishops’ official view of the 2004 election. It was political hardball, with some social action directors subject to e-mail campaigns in which chanceries were flooded with correspondence questioning their orthodoxy and commitment to church teaching.
“As a person who gave numerous … presentations on ‘Faithful Citizenship’ … before the election in November, I ran into significant resistance from self-described pro-life Catholics at nearly every talk,” a social action director told me recently. “In fact, through forwarded e-mail to the [chancery], we learned that I had been targeted by a coterie of these folks because they (correctly) presumed that I would be advocating a consistent ethic of life approach to evaluating candidates and issues, rather than advocating ‘authentic Catholic teaching’ that labels abortion as the single most important issue.”
In this case, diocesan officials stood firm. Parishes were instructed to use Faithful Citizenship and those of the state Catholic conference, and not the Catholic Answers Voter’s Guide. Nonetheless, “we were inundated with the [Catholic Answers] voting guide,” reports the social action director.
nationalcatholicreporter.org/washington/
Pamphlets in parking lots
In the outreach effort that ensued, the diocesan social action directors were blindsided. Millions of copies of the “Voter’s Guide for Serious Catholics” were distributed in church parking lots and foyers and inserted in parish bulletins. Catholic Answers took out a full-page ad in USA Today, and proponents of the nonnegotiables disrupted efforts to promote the bishops’ official view of the 2004 election. It was political hardball, with some social action directors subject to e-mail campaigns in which chanceries were flooded with correspondence questioning their orthodoxy and commitment to church teaching.
“As a person who gave numerous … presentations on ‘Faithful Citizenship’ … before the election in November, I ran into significant resistance from self-described pro-life Catholics at nearly every talk,” a social action director told me recently. “In fact, through forwarded e-mail to the [chancery], we learned that I had been targeted by a coterie of these folks because they (correctly) presumed that I would be advocating a consistent ethic of life approach to evaluating candidates and issues, rather than advocating ‘authentic Catholic teaching’ that labels abortion as the single most important issue.”
In this case, diocesan officials stood firm. Parishes were instructed to use Faithful Citizenship and those of the state Catholic conference, and not the Catholic Answers Voter’s Guide. Nonetheless, “we were inundated with the [Catholic Answers] voting guide,” reports the social action director.
nationalcatholicreporter.org/washington/