Vice President Kamala Harris is reintroducing herself to the citizens of the United States. That includes Catholics. Ms. Harris, who has become the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party after President Joe Biden stepped out of the race, has already hit the campaign trail. For Democratic voters increasingly alarmed by Mr. Biden’s faltering campaign, she represents the hope for a different outcome in November.
The first female vice president in our nation’s history has been on the national stage for the last four years and has proven herself a loyal supporter of Mr. Biden’s agenda. Ms. Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, served as California’s attorney general from 2010 until 2016, and was elected to the Senate in 2016.
Certainly, as Mr. Biden’s vice president, Ms. Harris will be associated with many of his policies. But she is running at the top of the ticket and voters will be examining her own positions on issues, including those of interest to Catholic voters like abortion, immigration, climate change, religious freedom, criminal justice reform and health care.
Abortion
Ms. Harris is well known for her advocacy of abortion rights. As attorney general in California, for example, she attempted to require pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to post information about access to free abortions. As a U.S. senator, she supported the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal funding for abortion. She also voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Protection Act in 2019 and 2020.
“We cannot tolerate a perspective that is about going backward and not understanding women have agency, women have value, women have authority to make decisions about their own lives and their own bodies,” Ms. Harris said as a presidential candidate in 2019.
Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Ms. Harris has been the administration’s chief spokesperson for abortion rights. In her first rally as the presumptive nominee on Tuesday, she promised, “When Congress passes a law to restore reproductive freedoms, as president of the United States I will sign it into law.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ stance on abortion is also well known and reflects the belief that human life begins at conception. The Catholic Church opposes direct abortion in every instance.
Immigration
While Ms. Harris’s stance on abortion is clear—and in the eyes of some Catholics, extreme—her record on immigration is more muddled, from the church’s perspective. On the one hand, the Biden-Harris administration has sought to address root causes of migration, an approach that resonates with Catholic social teaching. Last year, for example, Ms. Harris announced that private companies had pledged nearly $1 billion to support communities in Central America.
Immigration advocates, however, were less impressed with a visit she made to Guatemala in 2021. “I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border,” Ms. Harris said during the visit. “Do not come. Do not come.”
“O.K., that’s like saying, ‘Stay home and die,’” the Rev. Pat Murphy, a Scalabrini priest who runs the Casa del Migrante shelter in Tijuana, Baja California, told America at the time. “That message is falling on deaf ears.”
Some of the administration’s enforcement efforts at the U.S.-Mexico border have also drawn criticism from immigration advocates.
Climate change
After Pope Francis released his landmark encyclical, “Laudato Si’,” many Catholics recognized respect for the environment as central to their faith. Ms. Harris has consistently prioritized care for the environment, from her time in California to the vice presidency.
“Across our world, communities are choked by drought, washed out by floods, and decimated by hurricanes…. The urgency of this moment is clear,” she said last year during an address at COP28. “The clock is no longer just ticking; it is banging. And we must make up for lost time.”
As a California senator, Ms. Harris backed electrifying school buses and replacing lead water pipes, among other efforts. As attorney general of California, she fought against offshore fracking and investigated Exxon Mobil. And as a U.S. senator, she co-sponsored the Green New Deal, an ambitious climate agenda that has failed to make it through Congress.
Religious liberty
For years, the U.S. bishops have named religious liberty among their top concerns. In “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” the bishops write that “our first and most cherished freedom is rooted in the very dignity of the human person, a fundamental human right that knows no geographical boundaries.” The document quotes the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on religious freedom, “Dignitatis Humanae,” which says “no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.”
Ms. Harris’s commitment to religious liberty has been widely questioned. As senator, she questions Brian Buescher’s membership in the Knights of Columbus during his confirmation hearings to be a U.S. District Court judge in Nebraska. “Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?” she asked Mr. Buescher, seeming to imply that adherence to Catholic moral teaching would disqualify him from the appointment.
Others point to Ms. Harris’s sponsoring of the “Do No Harm Act,” which would have curtailed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was passed in 1993. “The freedom to worship is one of our nation’s most fundamental rights,” she said in a statement. “That First Amendment guarantee should never be used to undermine other Americans’ civil rights or subject them to discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”
Others have decried Ms. Harris’s failure to enforce a traditional marriage as California’s attorney general after the passage of Proposition 8. “I declined to defend Proposition 8 because it violates the Constitution,” she said at the time, anticipating the landmark Obergefell decision. “The Supreme Court has described marriage as a fundamental right 14 times since 1888. The time has come for this right to be afforded to every citizen.”
Criminal justice reform
In the Gospels, Jesus identifies himself with the incarcerated, saying, “I was a prisoner, and you visited me.” In their document on criminal justice, the U.S. bishops wrote, “The common good is undermined by criminal behavior that threatens the lives and dignity of others and by policies that seem to give up on those who have broken the law.”
“A Catholic approach begins with the recognition that the dignity of the human person applies to both victim and offender,” they wrote. “As bishops, we believe that the current trend of more prisons and more executions, with too little education and drug treatment, does not truly reflect Christian values and will not really leave our communities safer.”
Ms. Harris has what many describe as a mixed record when it comes to criminal justice reform. Like the church, she opposed the death penalty as district attorney in San Francisco and as California's attorney general (for the most part). Yet she has been criticized for her role in mass incarceration in the state, including upholding wrongful convictions and keeping nonviolent prisoners in prison. She also opposed efforts to require investigations of police shootings.
Yet in the Senate, she and Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky introduced a bill to reform bail practices. Ms. Harris joined Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Tim Scott of South Carolina to make lynching a federal crime. She supported the First Step Act, a law that reformed the criminal justice system and reduced the size of the federal prison population.
Health care
The Catholic Church recognizes health care as a human right.
“A just health care system will be concerned both with promoting equity of care—to assure that the right of each person to basic health care is respected—and with promoting the good health of all in the community,” according to the U.S. bishops’ document “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Heath Care Services.”
This sentiment can be found in Ms. Harris’ approach to health care as well. “In America, health care should be a right, not a privilege only for those who can afford it,” she wrote in 2019, explaining that she supported expanding the Affordable Care Act to Medicare for All, a single payer system.
Certainly, these issues represent only a small sample of the multitude Catholics will be weighing when making their decision this November. This year—especially the last month—has been unlike any in our nation’s history. Ms. Harris’s candidacy as a woman from a minority community representing a major party is itself unprecedented. Voters will see whether Ms. Harris seeks to redefine herself as her campaign evolves.
