Faithful Citizenship: Christianity and Politics for the 21st Century

Marriage must be defined, recognized, and protected as a lifelong exclusive commitment between a man and a woman, and as the source of the next generation and the protective haven for children. As Pope Francis has taught, "the removal of [sexual] difference creates a problem, not a solution" General Audience, April 22, This affirmation in no way compromises the Church's opposition to unjust discrimination against those who experience "deep-seated homosexual tendencies," who "must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity" Catechism of the Catholic Church , no.

Policies on taxes, work, divorce, immigration, and welfare should uphold the God-given meaning and value of marriage and family, help families stay together, and reward responsibility and sacrifice for children. Wages should allow workers to support their families, and public assistance should be available to help poor families to live in dignity.

Such assistance should be provided in a manner that promotes eventual financial autonomy. Children , in particular, are to be valued, protected, and nurtured.

Faithful Citizenship: Christianity and Politics for the 21st Century

As a Church, we affirm our commitment to the protection and well-being of children in our own institutions and in all of society. Pope Francis has stressed, "Children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother capable of creating a suitable environment for the child's development and emotional maturity" Address on the Complementarity Between Man and Woman, Nov.

Children who may be placed in foster care or with adoptive parents have a right to be placed in homes with a married man and woman, or if not possible, in environments that do not contradict the authentic meaning of marriage. Child welfare service providers, consistent with their religious beliefs, have a right to place children in such homes rather than in other environments. We oppose contraceptive and abortion mandates in public programs and health plans, which endanger rights of conscience and can interfere with parents' right to guide the moral formation of their children.

US policy should promote religious liberty vigorously, both at home and abroad: In all contexts, its basic contours are the same: In the United States, religious freedom generally enjoys strong protection in our law and culture, but those protections are now in doubt. For example, the longstanding tax exemption of the Church has been explicitly called into question at the highest levels of government, precisely because of her teachings on marriage.

Catholics have a particular duty to make sure that protections like these do not weaken but instead grow in strength. This is not only to secure the just freedom of the Church and the faithful here but also to offer hope and an encouraging witness to those who suffer direct and even violent religious persecution in countries where the protection is far weaker. Economic decisions and institutions should be assessed according to whether they protect or undermine the dignity of the human person.

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Social and economic policies should foster the creation of jobs for all who can work with decent working conditions and just wages. Barriers to equal pay and employment for women and those facing unjust discrimination must be overcome. Catholic social teaching supports the right of workers to choose whether to organize , join a union, and bargain collectively, and to exercise these rights without reprisal. It also affirms economic freedom, initiative, and the right to private property. Workers, owners, employers, and unions have a corresponding responsibility to work together to create decent jobs, build a more just economy, and advance the common good.

We also note with growing concern the increase in "excessive social and economic inequalities," as the Catechism of the Catholic Church refers to it, and the shrinking middle class. We support legislation that protects consumers from the excessive and exploitative rates of interest charged by many payday lenders. Welfare policy should reduce poverty and dependency, strengthen family life, and help families leave poverty through work, training, and assistance with child care, health care, housing, and transportation.

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Given the link between family stability and economic success, welfare policy should address both the economic and cultural factors that contribute to family breakdown. It should also provide a safety net for those who cannot work. Improving the Earned Income Tax Credit and child tax credits , available as refunds to families in greatest need, will help lift low-income families out of poverty. Faith-based groups deserve recognition and support, not as a substitute for government, but as responsive, effective partners, especially in the poorest communities and countries.

The USCCB actively supports conscience clauses and other religious freedom protections, opposes any effort to undermine the ability of faith-based groups to preserve their identity and integrity as partners with government, and is committed to protecting long-standing civil rights and other protections for both religious groups and the people they serve. Government bodies should not require Catholic institutions to compromise their moral or religious convictions to participate in government health or human service programs. Social Security should provide adequate, continuing, and reliable income in an equitable manner for low- and average-wage workers and their families when these workers retire or become disabled, and for the survivors when a wage-earner dies.

The USCCB continues to oppose unjust housing discrimination and to support measures to meet the credit needs of low-income and minority communities.

A first priority for agriculture policy should be food security for all. Farmers and farm workers who grow, harvest, and process food deserve a just return for their labor, with safe and just working conditions and adequate housing. Supporting rural communities sustains a way of life that enriches our nation.

Careful stewardship of the earth and its natural resources demands policies that support sustainable agriculture as vital elements of agricultural policy. Affordable and accessible health care is an essential safeguard of human life and a fundamental human right. Despite an increase in the number of people insured, millions of Americans still lack health care coverage. Health care coverage remains an urgent national priority. The nation's health care system needs to be rooted in values that respect human dignity, protect human life, respect the principle of subsidiarity, and meet the needs of the poor and uninsured, especially born and unborn children, pregnant women, immigrants, and other vulnerable populations.

Employers, including religious groups and family-owned businesses, should be able to provide health care without compromising their moral or religious convictions, and individuals should be able to purchase health care that accords with their faith. The Gospel mandate to "welcome the stranger" requires Catholics to care for and stand with newcomers , authorized and unauthorized, including unaccompanied immigrant children, refugees and asylum-seekers, those unnecessarily detained, and victims of human trafficking.

Comprehensive reform is urgently necessary to fix a broken immigration system and should include a broad and fair legalization program with a path to citizenship; a work program with worker protections and just wages; family reunification policies; access to legal protections, which include due process procedures; refuge for those fleeing persecution and violence; and policies to address the root causes of migration. The right and responsibility of nations to control their borders and to maintain the rule of law should be recognized but pursued in a just and humane manner.

The detention of immigrants should be used to protect public safety and not for purposes of deterrence or punishment; alternatives to detention, including community-based programs, should be emphasized. As Pope Francis has said, human trafficking is a "crime against humanity" Address, Dec. Trafficking victims, most especially children, should receive care and protection, including special consideration for permanent legal status.

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Additional education and mobilization efforts are needed to address the root causes of human trafficking—poverty, conflict, and the breakdown of judicial process in source countries. Parents—the first and most important educators—have a fundamental right to choose the education best suited to the needs of their children, including public, private, and religious schools. Government, through such means as tax credits and publicly funded scholarships, should help provide resources for parents, especially those of modest means, to exercise this basic right without discrimination.

Students in all educational settings should have opportunities for moral and character formation consistent with the beliefs and responsibilities of their parents. All persons have a right to receive a quality education. Young people, including those who are poor and those with disabilities, need to have the opportunity to develop intellectually, morally, spiritually, and physically, allowing them to become good citizens who make socially and morally responsible decisions.

This requires parental choice in education. It also requires educational institutions to have orderly, just, respectful, and non-violent environments where adequate professional and material resources are available. The USCCB strongly supports adequate funding, including scholarships, tax credits, and other means, to educate all persons no matter what their personal condition or what school they attend—public, private, or religious.

All teachers and administrators deserve salaries and benefits that reflect principles of economic justice, as well as access to resources necessary for teachers to prepare for their important tasks. Services aimed at improving education—especially for those most at risk—that are available to students and teachers in public schools should also be available to students and teachers in private and religious schools as a matter of justice.

Promoting moral responsibility and effective responses to violent crime, curbing violence in media, supporting reasonable restrictions on access to assault weapons and handguns, and opposing the use of the death penalty are particularly important in light of a growing "culture of violence. A humane and remedial rather than a strictly punitive approach to offenders should be developed. Such an approach includes supporting efforts that justly reduce the prison population, help people leaving prison to reintegrate into their communities, combat recidivism, promote just sentencing reform, and strengthen relationships between the police and the communities they serve.

It is important for our society to continue to combat any unjust discrimination, whether based on race, religion, sex, ethnicity, disabling condition, or age, as these are grave injustices and affronts to human dignity. Where the effects of past discrimination persist, society has the obligation to take positive steps to overcome the legacy of injustice, including vigorous action to remove barriers to education, protect voting rights, support good policing in our communities, and ensure equal employment for women and minorities.

Care for Creation is a moral issue.

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Protecting the land, water, and air we share is a religious duty of stewardship and reflects our responsibility to born and unborn children, who are most vulnerable to environmental assault. We must answer the question that Pope Francis posed to the world: There are many concrete steps we can take to assure justice and solidarity between the generations. Effective initiatives are required for energy conservation and the development of alternate, renewable, and clean-energy resources. Our Conference offers a distinctive call to seriously address global climate change , focusing on the virtue of prudence, pursuit of the common good, and the impact on the poor, particularly on vulnerable workers and the poorest nations.

The United States should lead in contributing to the sustainable development of poorer nations and promoting greater justice in sharing the burden of environmental blight, neglect, and recovery. It is important that we address the rising number of migrants who are uprooted from their homeland as a consequence of environmental degradation and climate change.

They are not currently recognized as refugees under any existing international convention and are thus not afforded legal protections that ought to be due to them. Our nation's efforts to reduce poverty should not be associated with demeaning and sometimes coercive population control programs.

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Such an approach is condemned by Pope Francis: Our efforts should, instead, focus on working with the poor to help them build a future of hope and opportunity for themselves and their children. Print, broadcast, and electronic media shape the culture. To protect children and families, responsible regulation is needed that respects freedom of speech yet also addresses policies that have lowered standards, permitted increasingly offensive material, and reduced opportunities for non-commercial religious programming. Regulation should limit concentration of media control, resist management that is primarily focused on profit, and encourage a variety of program sources, including religious programming.

TV rating systems and appropriate technology can assist parents in supervising what their children view. The Internet offers both great benefits and significant problems. Together with the Pope, the bishops form a college which serves the Word of God by handing on Divine Revelation entrusted to the Church in scripture and Tradition cf. The Second Vatican Council, in particular, saw the role of the laity to be the sanctification and transformation of the temporal order:.

This task of the lay faithful would be all the more significant and challenging in a pluralistic and democratic society where the civil order would be best influenced by the voice of lay leaders. The temptation might be to short-circuit the process and have clergy begin to determine directly political solutions and annunciate preferences in the selection of candidates for public office. The understanding of the distinctive role of the laity in the mission of the Church was developed further, beyond the insights of the Second Vatican Council, by Pope St.

In his apostolic exhortation Christifideles Laici he connected the vocation of the laity in the world to the living out of the universal call to holiness spoken of in Lumen Gentium: Included in the temporal order which the laity animate with the light of the Gospel is the political realm which is preeminently the domain of the laity.

This worldview is opposed to those that recognize transcendent points of reference. This is a far cry from the days when the Church viewed herself or her leaders as wielding secular political or military power. The Holy Father is clear on the distinction: It is true that the Church seeks to inform the moral deliberation and political participation of her members as well as other believers or persons of good will with its public social teaching, but this is not intended to dictate outcomes in the political arena. As Benedict XVI explains: Even less is it an attempt to impose on those who do not share the faith ways of thinking and modes of conduct proper to faith.

Pope Francis has consciously echoed these themes of the Council and his predecessors in his own teaching. Like Pope Benedict, he has insisted on the autonomy of politics and religion:. In regard to this teaching role of the Church, Pope Francis writes in his first apostolic exhortation: Together with the various sectors of society, she supports those programs which best respond to the dignity of each person and the common good. The same idea can be found in his most recent encyclical: Here I would state once more that the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions or to replace politics.

Pope Francis, in his Address to the Italian Episcopal Conference May 18, has also insisted on the responsibility of the laity for the temporal order without unnecessary clerical supervision and interference: From the political to the social. From the economic to the legislative.

Such studies highlight the shrinking number of Christians within the overall population. Basic Christian moral commitments are viewed as sectarian at best or more often as bigoted. And the moral relativism and confusion of the culture is increasingly carried into the churches by baptized persons who are more formed by their culture than by the faith which they profess. Part of the emphasis in the New Evangelization is that it can be spearheaded by laity centered in parishes, associations, movements and — above all — families. The recent Synods offered the Church an opportunity to ponder how better to form and equip families to be active subjects and participants in this great endeavor.

To accomplish this goal, the document offers highlights of major themes of Catholic teaching, particularly those that touch on issues that are reflected in the current political process. Foremost among the foundational teachings are the four basic principles of Catholic social doctrine: The document groups issues under these headings.

It is up to the individual to apply those guiding principles to the specific political issues of the day. The applications may vary. That teaching document makes clear the complexity of moral decision-making when exercising political responsibility. It is also emphatic that this task falls to the laity in the civil political order. The laity have the equally demanding responsibility to apply these teachings to the temporal, political order. Both work together, but neither can replace the other.

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