So it is acceptable for a candidate to do evil so that good may come from it, and a Catholic can support him?
The Church teaches that one cannot do evil so that good may come from it. How would it be permissible to support a candidate who lies, does evil, to be elected, so that good may come from it?
Also, Romney at one time said he was more pro choice than Ted Kennedy. That changed as his political aspirations changed. If he is willing to ‘bend’ the truth on one subject, how can one be held accountable for questioning his credibility on other issues?
Romney’s actions are on Romney. If Romney does evil so that good may come from it, he will answer for that when he stands before God.
But so long as we don’t vote for Romney
because of whatever evil he will do, but as an attempt to limit evil that is done and to try to steer the country, by what little influence we have, to a slightly less disastrous course, we’re ok. We aren’t doing the evil, we aren’t condoning the evil - we’re just pushing back as much of the evil as we can. It just turns out that “as much as we can” isn’t as much as we would like.
An example: you are the pilot of a plan that terrorists have somehow managed to get a nuclear bomb onto. You can’t defuse the bomb, you have no idea how to and would probably set it off if you tried. It will go off shortly. Your plane is scheduled to land in NYC, and you are currently above outlying parts of the city. You don’t have time to fly into a completely uninhabited area. Then what you do is, you steer the plane to get as far away from as many people as you can. The bomb will go off and many will die, and you can’t stop that, but you can try your best to limit the evil that occurs to a smaller number deaths. You didn’t cause the deaths. You certainly didn’t condone them. All you did was try to lower the death count in the only way available to you.
Same concept applies. We have two presidential candidates who have the possibility of winning. Neither is pro-life. But one will kill many, many, more people than the other. All that you can do is to try to steer the election away from the person who condones mass murder to the person who condones slightly less mass murder. The evil will occur. You cannot prevent it. All you can do is avoid as much of it as possible. But in doing so, you are neither the cause of, nor condoning, the murder that will occur. That is,
you are not doing bad that good may come of it. You are not doing bad at all. The candidates will if elected, but that’s on them.
These are important questions as the only reason I’ve considered voting for him are the people who are saying a Catholic MUST vote for Romney in this instance. My other options were not voting, or writing in another candidate. I want sincere Church teaching on the matter and not partisan explanations under the guise of Church teaching.
It is true that Church does not require that we vote Romney. The Church requires that we use our judgement to the best of our ability and do what we determine to be the right thing. For some of us, myself included, that means voting Romney, and there is no reason why we can’t try to convince each other that our judgements are correct and hence convince others that voting Romney is the right thing and that,
that person now being convinced, it is what we are required by the Church to do. The “that person now being convinced” is the key though. If a person is not convinced that Romney is the best choice, then I may think he is wrong, or that he is not good at applying principles, or that he is illogical to some degree, but I
cannot say that I know he is going against Church teaching.
But it is absolutely correct to say that, a priori and not factoring in individual judgement and the reasoning from principles that we are required to do, the Church does not require that we vote Romney. Again, I think that reasoning from principles does (generally speaking, with some exceptions that aren’t interesting) require a vote for Romney, but no other person is bound by my reasoning on the matter unless I can convince them that it is correct. At which point they would be bound by it. Which is why I try to convince them that it is correct - because I think it is and that it should be followed.
But again: any argument no more complicated than “the Church says vote Romney” is wrong.
