“I, as your pastor, am asking you therefore first of all to vote, which is your duty. It is your duty as a Catholic and it is your duty as a citizen of the United States of America. And don’t forget your picture I.D. when you go. And then, secondly, but most importantly, when you step in that voting booth, you vote your Catholic faith. You vote your Catholic faith by making life, that is love, genuine Christ-centered love, the first and foremost criterion of your life and the actions that flow there from, not least of which is casting a vote.”
– Monsignor James E. Hart 10/26/2014
My fellow Catholics, if your priest has shied away from exhorting you, as a Catholic, to vote, then please take the 14 minutes to listen to one of my pastor’s homilies from this voting season. Catholics comprise 26% of our nation. We are the group with the largest unified influence in our country, provided we all vote and vote as Catholics according to the teaching of our Catholic faith. Together we can defend the defenseless.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2240, under the heading “The Duty of Citizens” compels us: “Submission to authority and co-responsibility for the common good make it morally obligatory to pay taxes, to exercise the right to vote, and to defend one’s country”.
Dear Readers, help us encourage those who haven’t planned on voting today. Share with us why you find it important to vote, or share with us if you voted early or will be voting today.
More from Msgr. Hart’s Homily:
“In fact, we in the West are being presented with another gospel, a gospel with a Christ without a cross.”
“Our neighbor is, in fact, anyone who bears the Imago Dei, the image of God in their souls, which is every man, every woman, every child without exception, from the very moment of his or her conception”
“As we approach November the 4th and prepare once again to go into the voting booth, we need to remind ourselves that this defense of the defenseless, this compassion for our neighbor finds its fulfillment as the Catholic Church teaches us in the defense of the most defenseless of all, the unborn child in the womb of his or her mother. The moral law, the law of love compels us as the people of God to stand for and defend innocent human life by all legal and morally sanctioned means against the culture of death and those who advocate for it. Whether it is the unborn child, the aging parent who some call a burden on our medical system, the allegedly excess embryos in the fertility clinic, the person with a disability, the cognitively impaired accident victim who needs assistance in receiving food and water to live. They must be defended. Each of these today must be so defended because they are at risk. They are at risk of being dismissed as lives unworthy of life. This is sick. And it is a sickness in our culture, a sickness unto death. We Catholics must not shrink from the obligation to assert in the voting booth, as in every aspect of our lives, the values and principles of our Catholic faith, which are essential to the common good, beginning with the right to live from the moment of conception when God implants that soul in that very life.”
