To My Fellow Catholics, Just Before Election Day

“We must face the reality that the prevalence of abortion is a manifestation of our distressed sociality and corrupted sense of mutual responsibility.”

With the publication of his third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, earlier this month, Pope Francis has provided American Catholics with something extraordinary this election season. In the words of political theologian Professor Anna Rowlands, Francis has given us a chance “to stop and begin to look again” at the world around us and our role in shaping it. With a presidential election fast approaching, American Catholics ought to read and reflect upon Francis’s words and the invitation that he has extended to us—an invitation to step back and reflect upon our faith and how we are called to live out that faith as human beings and as citizens.

One of the fundamental propositions of Fratelli Tutti is that human dignity and human fraternity are deeply intertwined. He writes, “It is my desire that…by acknowledging the dignity of each human person, we can contribute to the rebirth of a universal aspiration to fraternity.” In other words, our acknowledgment of equal human dignity should lend itself to our embrace of fraternal love, of interconnectedness, of sociality.

This is a radical teaching, one that is at odds with how we tend to think of our human dignity. We often conceptualize our human dignity in an individuated form. We think of our human dignity in ways akin to negative liberty—as a “protection from” (murder, abuse, neglect); however, Francis teaches us that it is also a “calling to” (serving others, embracing interdependence, eschewing the false promise of self-sufficiency). Human dignity is the basis upon which we should establish not only our negative freedoms but also our positive duties to serve, love, and care for one another.