Can you please provide an official Vatican document that says that Catholics are required to vote based on abortion as the sole important reason to vote for a candidate? Or from the Bishops?
Who of the magisterium said there were no proportionate reasons that would allow a Catholic to vote for any candidate (not just BO) that is pro-choice? Is there a Chuch document from the Vatican or from our Bishops saying that Catholics were not allowed to vote for (ie BO) a specific candidate who was or is pro-choice?
So far, the documents you have provided have done no such thing. Though they do specifically say that the Church does not tell voters for whom to vote, or for whom not to vote. They also listed a number of issues to consider when voting.
Rence perhaps the following will give you something mull over.Bishop is a member of the Magisterium? Partial doc. for the full statement go to:
zenit.org/article-19058?l=english
ZE07030301 - 2007-03-03
Bishop Fisher on Conscience and Authority
“Struggling to Recover a Catholic Sense”
VATICAN CITY, MARCH 3, 2007 (
Zenit.org).- Here is the text Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney, Australia, delivered at the conference sponsored by the Pontifical Academy for Life and held in the Vatican last Friday and Saturday. The theme of the conference was “The Christian Conscience in Support of the Right to Life.”* * *
Conscience is only right conscience when it accurately mediates and applies that natural law which participates in the divine law; it is erroneous when it does not. Thus, as I suggested earlier, it may be more helpful to think of conscience as a verb (a doing word), describing the human mind thinking practically towards good or godly choices, rather than reifying it as a noun, a faculty or voice with divine qualities
Such reverence for persons and their consciences is perfectly consistent with denying that conscience is infallible or has “primacy” over truth or faith or the teachings of Christ and his Church. As we will see, the magisterium seeks to enable conscience to achieve a more reliable mediation and application of moral truth: It is always objective moral truth that has primacy and only this which can be infallibly true.
, it might suffice to recall the three moral “dogmas” to be found in John Paul II’s encyclical on bioethics, “Evangelium vitæ.” Here he was careful to cite the texts from Vatican II regarding the papal and episcopal magisterium in moral matters, and to use the language of Petrine authority. The clearest exercise of the highest level of papal magisterium was with respect to direct killing of the innocent. John Paul then applied this teaching to abortion and euthanasia, both of which he confirmed were grave moral disorders. Though there are some differences, in each case he claimed the authority of the natural law, the Scriptures and the Tradition, the ordinary and universal magisterium, the disciplinary tradition of the Church, the unanimous agreement of the bishops – and, now, “the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his successors”./COLOR]Around the time of Vatican II, Karl Rahner wrote that conscience is the proximate source of moral obligation, and so must be followed even if mistaken; COLOR=“red”]but that we must form our conscience rightly and avoid confusing it with subjective inclination or personal preference. A Catholic must be prepared to accept moral instruction from the Church and never appeal to conscience to make an exception for himself If we realized that we may very well have to sacrifice everything or lose our soul, then we would not look for exceptions to be made for us from God’s law and our confessors would not use evasions like “follow your conscience” when some hard if sensitive teaching were needed. If in our sinful world God’s law seems unrealistic, the trouble is not with God’s law but with the world!The “crisis of '68” was a crisis at least in part over the meaning of conscience, its implications for decision-making and its relationship to the magisterium. In the 1970s a number of theologians proceeded to deny that the Scriptures, the Tradition and the hierarchy have any “strong” magisterium in moral matters. The “situationists” echoed the contemporary exaltation of human freedom and rejection of appeals to nature, reason, authority or any static, universal or objectivist standards; what mattered, in the end, was whether the person’s “heart was in the right place.” The “proportionalists” asserted that the role of conscience was to identify and balance upsides and downsides of options and that the Church could propose some “rules of thumb” for this balancing act, but no moral absolutes. Some argued that it was impossible for the Church to teach infallibly in morals; others said that while it could in principle, it never had done so; and both agreed that the ordinary teaching of the Church is “susceptible to error and therefore fallible.”
We are all well aware of how thoroughly the 1970s-'80s style of moral thinking filtered down through many of our societies, even if it was rarely dressed up in the highfalutin language of “ontic evils” and “authenticity.” In a slightly more sophisticated form it was taught to a generation of priests and lay theology students. It will take some time to recover a more Catholic sense of the role and content of conscience and the magisterium.
There goes the political view theory.
Just shaking my sandals.