Conscientious responsibilities and frightful consequences
By Alan Fimister | 23 April 2025
Elections are in the forefront of many minds at the moment. The people of Canada will soon go to the polls and the Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church are gathering at St Peter’s for the obsequies of Pope Francis and the election of his successor. At first glance it may seem as if these two elections are very different. The electorate in Rome is exceedingly small. Their right to vote is very clearly a highly exclusive honour and privilege. They are endowed with this right by positive law (that is, laws written by men) but they exercise the right as given them by God; God offers them special graces in its exercise, and they are answerable to God for the manner in which they exercise it. But in fact exactly the same things are true of a civil election like that of Canada.
In general, all electorates are, relative to the human race, exceedingly small. Despite the campaign for open borders, citizenship in any state remains a privilege. All men are subject to the power of some state, but that they share in its sovereign powers, while desirable, is not a natural right. Leo XIII teaches that, “Unless it be otherwise determined, by reason of some exceptional condition of things, it is expedient to take part in the administration of public affairs. And the Church approves of every one devoting his services to the common good, and doing all that he can for the defence, preservation, and prosperity of his country.” Thus, it belongs to the well-being, but not to the essence, of a society that its constitution contain a democratic element. Few sensible people think that minors, criminals and foreigners should participate in the sovereign powers. In former times, the ownership of productive property, the degree of master in a guild or university or in military service were requirements for the franchise. In times of mass literacy, these requirements were removed but, widely distributed though it may be, the vote remains a privilege.
The idea that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed” is false. As St Paul instructed us, “there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God” (Rom 13:1). This does not mean, St John Chrysostom explains, that the rulers are chosen by God. God constituted human nature such that there must be a civil power and He constituted the Church such that there must be a Pope but He does not select the Pope or our Members of Parliament for us. God created marriage, Chrysostom observes, and our duties to our spouses are given to us by God, but we chose our own spouses. God provides us with graces to discharge the office of ecclesiastical or civil elector, and to select our husband or wife, but He does not promise that He will cause us to make use of those graces. The right to vote comes to us from a privilege of the civil law, but the binding power of law comes from human nature (or in the case of canon law, from divine revelation) and so from God. The voter is in his own small way one of the “powers that be”. He exercises a power of divine origin and he is answerable to God for how he exercises it. As the great German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer explained:
“[T]he state is a system of order willed by God, and therefore necessarily founded on God, then everyone within the political order who bears responsibility, anywhere and in any manner, must always be aware that he bears this responsibility before his own conscience and before God. In a democratic, parliamentary state, in which the system of democracy is actualized down to the smallest community, every one of us bears responsibility. Some have more, some less, but all of us have a responsibility that no one can take away from us. If we do not meet this responsibility, there are consequences. And those consequences can be frightful for us, for our children and children’s children.”
Once the office (Pope, MP, etc.) is filled, however, the office holder himself now derives his power directly from God. As Leo XIII explained, “by this choice [the election], in truth, the ruler is designated, but the rights of ruling are not thereby conferred. Nor is the authority delegated to him, but the person by whom it is to be exercised is determined upon”. This truth is liberating because, in the false world of “contractualism” where governing powers are imagined to be derived from the consent of the governed, the resulting public official is effectively the plenipotentiary representative of the voter, and so the voter is morally involved in all the official actions of this person (especially if he voted for this candidate and even more if the candidate stated his intentions in advance of the decision). If one candidate espouses euthanasia, abortion, sodomy and divorce, while the other candidate espouses only sodomy and divorce, one would be obliged to vote for neither and perhaps thereby assist, by omission, in the victory of the former because one would otherwise be guilty of the sins of sodomy and divorce through one’s agent.
In the real world, where the powers that be are ordained of God, one may rather use such influence as one has to obtain the best candidate available and he will then have to answer to God for his actions in the discharge of his civil duties. This works the other way around as well. The electors of each constituency must judge for themselves how well formed the conscience would seem to be of each candidate presented for their consideration; but, once elected, each Member of Parliament must discharge his duties in accordance with his conscience regardless of the views of his constituents. As Edmund Burke memorably put it:
“[I]t ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
It is worth mentioning that this does not apply to plebiscites. If one is directly casting one’s vote for a specific measure, it matters not if the proposal would remedy some or even many wicked defects in the present civil arrangements; if it itself contains anything intrinsically evil, one may not vote for it or one will be directly responsible for the evil itself.
On the other hand, we must not be caught in the “conservative” trap, where the political system is so constituted that one is always presented with a choice between a radical liberal and a more squeamish liberal and compelled for fear of the radical liberal to vote for the (often disingenuously) squeamish liberal only to have the squeamish candidate adopt the positions of the radical a few years later as the radical moves on to the next abomination. In the USA, one may attempt to avoid this ratcheting effect by seeking out superior candidates and promoting them through the primaries. In the UK, there is little alternative to becoming directly involved in the political system, either through the two main parties or separately from them. As various insurgent parties in Britain have shown over recent years, groups outside the two main parties can be effective in signaling to the main parties that there are election-winning blocks of votes to be had if only they would move closer to some other set of policies.
There is of course room for all these strategies simultaneously. To take an example unconnected to natural or divine law, Farage and Vote Leave both played a role in securing a victory for Brexit in the 2016 referendum, but their effectiveness required precisely that they not work together. An expressly pro-life party and pro-life politicians within established parties and non-political lobbying groups all perform different functions on the ideological battlefield of modern politics. There is a danger in the cause of life becoming (as in America) associated exclusively with only one political party. It will become all too easy for that party to take the votes of the upholders of the natural law for granted and for their principal opponent simply to write them off. Catholics ought not too easily to declare membership in a political party to be immoral. Unless the party’s aims are incompatible with the law of God, the fact that its policies are does not preclude membership (even if it will often prevent one voting for the party in question).
The greatest influence of course is wielded by Bishops who actually preach the Gospel, uphold the moral law and maintain Eucharistic discipline within the Church. Such prelates can potentially exercise vastly more power for good over the political system than any formally political action by laymen.
The sphere of lay political life, of course, ought not to be an ideological battlefield. The temporal political order exists to uphold the natural moral law and determine indifferent questions of technique (which side of the road to drive on, how many pennies in the pound etc.) which we have a responsibility to determine but which fall outside the moral law itself. Whether to murder unborn babies or whether men can marry other men are not questions which should be being discussed in the first place. The zealous apostles of modernity are in no doubt on this point. Insofar as lies within them, they will excommunicate from the Overton window any person who obstinately doubts or denies the propriety of these sins, with the objective that there will one day be a suicidal unanimity around the culture of death in every land. That is, they are executing vigorously (if still mostly informally) within the world the duty for which, within the Church, Our Lord instituted the episcopate.
The two elections preoccupying many Catholics in the coming weeks are therefore intertwined. Were the hierarchs of the Church to teach, sanctify and govern as the Lord has instructed them to do and so impose the Eucharistic discipline, for which they will be held to account on the last day, then the task of training our temporal rulers to choose life and rule wisely within their proper sphere would essentially accomplish itself.
Long gone are the days when a lay Catholic in good standing could participate in the election of his diocesan bishop. So, even for the few who live in Rome itself, unless they are Cardinals under the age of eighty, there is no way of influencing the forthcoming Conclave other than by taking our Rosaries in our hands and following the advice St Paul gave to the Romans two thousand years ago:
“Salute Mary, who hath laboured much among you.” (Rom 16:6)