In an interview with John Allen, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn (chairman of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Domestic Policy) discussed the draft USCCB voting guide, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States. On the document itself:
“I think it’s pretty even. I think you’d have a hard time trying to misuse this document. Hopefully, it will be helpful for people making decisions. We’re into a situation, the way it looks right now a year away, in which you’re not going to have any candidate who is outstanding on all of our issues. Such a person just isn’t there. We’re going to have to look very carefully and use some moral principles to come to difficult decisions about these options. It comes down to this: Are you not going to vote? Or are you going to vote for somebody who doesn’t completely hold our positions? That’s the difficulty we face. It’s a very difficult situation for a voter today.”
Allen asked whether he would discourage rival Catholic voter’s guides. DiMarzio:
“We can’t discourage that, but what we can discourage is their distribution through the church. Something handed out by parishes should be approved by the diocese or the state Catholic conference. Anybody can produce whatever they want, but that doesn’t mean they have the right to give it out within church premises and so on. It gives the appearance that it has an official status. We’ve produced a two-page bulletin announcement summarizing Faithful Citizenship. It’s difficult to summarize all that tight reasoning in two pages, but I think we did a fairly decent job with it. That would be the official thing that we would ask bishops to authorize and distribute.”
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