The Pope’s intervention in the US election could be bad news for Catholics – and democracy

Where does politics end and religion begin? Pope Francis has stoked that debate once again with his recent intervention in the US presidential campaign, where he commented on the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

Voters, he told journalists on his plane back to Rome from a tour of Asia, will have to choose between the “lesser” of two evils: that of Donald Trump’s anti-migrant policies, and Kamala Harris’s support for women’s abortion rights.

This may seem puzzling to some, who view being anti-migrant and supportive of abortion as at opposite ends of the political spectrum. But from the Pope’s point of view, they are part of a continuum of being “pro-life” – thinking that has seen Francis also speak out passionately against the death penalty and the Catholic Church being opposed to assisted dying.

Life, according to its theology, is a gift from God, and so must be cherished. That includes helping migrants, not leaving them to their fate in the Mediterranean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico. It also means that nobody has a God-given right to take it away – hence opposition to abortion, the death penalty and assisted dying.

Pope Francis’s view of the sacredness of life, and the need to take an ethical stance, has also led him to intervene many times in speaking about the need to counter climate change, because it not only threatens God’s creation – planet Earth – but also harms the poorest and most vulnerable people across the globe.

He is not the first pope to speak out, either. Papal political interventions have a strong track record, including John Paul II’s regular denunciations of communism as a threat to humanity’s freedom. Pius XI, too, issued an encyclical – or teaching document – in 1937, denouncing the racial purity theories of the Nazis.

People, of course, tend to approve of such interventions when they’re on the same side as a religious leader – climate change activists cheer on Pope Francis’s statements on the planet – but when they oppose the issue at hand, they condemn such intercessions as meddlesome and interfering.

From its beginnings, the US has been particularly wary of any overlap between religion and politics; it was Thomas Jefferson in 1802 who first used the phrase “separation of church and state”. It’s an idea which cuts both ways – it means freedom for individuals to practise their particular faith, just as it means keeping clerics out of government.

Yet in America in particular, that divide between faith and politics has become part of the culture wars, particularly during Francis’s pontificate. Sometimes the situation has become even more complicated, with Francis coming into conflict with hardline US Catholic bishops.

While they have argued that abortion is the pre-eminent issue, he has said that migration is just as much of an ethical problem. In 2016, Francis described then presidential candidate Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall to stop migrants from crossing the US-Mexico border as “not Christian”.

But while President Joe Biden and speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (both Catholics) received a tongue-lashing over their support for abortion rights from US Catholic bishops – one of whom even denied communion to Pelosi – Pope Francis was more circumspect, urging decisions about abortion to be made from a pastoral rather than a political viewpoint.

So it’s intriguing that Pope Francis has spoken out this time, clearly criticising Baptist Kamala Harris for her stance on abortion. It suggests that he is politically canny, realising that it is problematic if a pope appears to be telling a Catholic president what to do. In order to avoid this perception during his presidential campaign, John F Kennedy even famously went so far as to say “I am not the Catholic candidate for president”.

Given that American Catholics number 52 million, they make up an important voting bloc. This is especially true in some battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where more than 20 per cent of adults are Catholic. But that bloc has not, until now, been a uniform one.

Catholic voters can be hard to pigeonhole. According to the authoritative Pew Research, 52 per cent of Catholic registered voters say they are Republican or leaning that way, while 44 per cent say they are or lean Democrat. And in 2020, around half voted for Biden, says Pew, while 49 per cent backed Trump.

And yet, I see a problem just over the horizon. This time, Pope Francis spoke of the need for people to judge each of the two presidential candidates and decide which is the lesser of two evils. He has given both short shrift. But, despite this attempt at diplomacy, he is but a few steps away from making his views known about which choice to make.

Intervening on ethical issues and speaking up about them is one of the roles of a global faith leader like Pope Francis. But edging that bit closer to commentary on the candidates in a democratic ballot – that is a high-wire act that could end very badly.

It won’t benefit the Pope, it won’t benefit the Church – and it certainly won’t benefit Catholics who, since the time of JFK, have striven to be seen as people who exercise their conscience rather than being mere papal patsies.

Catherine Pepinster is a former editor of ‘The Tablet’, the Catholic weekly