ROME, October 6, 2005 (CWNews.com/LifeSiteNews.com) – The president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care has stated flatly that Catholics cannot, in conscience, support a politician who favors legal abortion.
Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan made his remarks in an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica. He was responding indirectly to an intervention by Archbishop William Levada during the discussions of the Synod of Bishop. Archbishop Levada—the American prelate recently chosen by Pope Benedict XVI (bio – news) to be prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—had asked other prelates to reflect on the question that had divided the US hierarchy during the 2004 election year: How bishops should respond to Catholic politicians who support abortion.
“A Catholic cannot support a politician who presents abortion as a general norm,” said Cardinal Lozano. The Mexican prelate added that “a son of the Church cannot consider himself to be in full communion if he supports what the Church condemns.”
A Catholic voter, the Vatican’s “health minister” continued, should discriminate among the issues on the political agenda. An informed voter, he said, “should know how to distinguish between what represents an attack on life and what promotes the defense of life.” He added that a Catholic voter can never be justified in supporting “what constitutes an attack on life.”
In the Instrumentum Laboris, the working document on which discussions are based during the Synod of Bishops, one passage—paragraph 73—directly addresses the issue raised by Archbishop Levada:
“Some receive Communion while denying the teachings of the Church or publicly supporting immoral choices in life, such as abortion, without thinking that they are committing an act of grave personal dishonesty and causing scandal. Some Catholics do not understand why it might be a sin to support a political candidate who is openly in favor of abortion or other serious acts against life, justice and peace. Such attitudes lead to, among other things, a crisis in the meaning of belonging to the Church and in a clouding of the distinction between venial and mortal sin.”
Cardinal Lozano observed that the Instrumentum Laboris is still a working document, not ratified by the Synod. But the final document from the assembly could say substantially the same thing, he said. In November 2002, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a “doctrinal note” on Catholic participation in political life. That note, signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, said that “a well formed Christian conscience does not permit one to vote for a political program or an individual law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals.”
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