The U.S. presidential election in November took center stage in the 42-minute press conference given by Pope Francis on the flight from Singapore to Rome on Sept. 13. An American journalist asked the pope what advice he would give to Catholics in the United States on voting, given that one of the candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris, supports broad access to abortion, while the other candidate, former president Donald J. Trump, says that if elected, he will deport 11 million undocumented migrants.
“Both are against life. Both are against life. Both: the one who throws out migrants and the one who kills children. Both are against life,” Pope Francis stated.
His answer reaffirmed what he has taught since his election as pope: Abortion is against the Catholic Church’s teaching on life, but so, too, are other assaults on human dignity that affect the poor, migrants, victims of human trafficking and others.
The U.S. bishops have long described abortion and euthanasia as “pre-eminent” concerns for political engagement in their teaching document “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.” In 2019, the bishops quoted Pope Francis in their introductory letter to that document but rejected a proposal to include a full paragraph from his exhortation “Gaudete et Exsultate” in which he critiques the view that “the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause” (No. 101).
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Francis says he is aware of how U.S. bishops generally view the question of abortion as it relates to the election from discussions at the Vatican during their ad limina visits and on other occasions.
In November 2023, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a new introduction to “Faithful Citizenship” that affirmed abortion as their pre-eminent priority, despite calls from some bishops to overhaul the document in response to modern challenges and to reflect new insights from Pope Francis. The document was produced in 2007, before the Francis papacy.
At today’s press conference, the pope explained why he saw the positions of both presidential candidates as “against life.” He began by addressing the question of migrants, saying, “To send migrants away or to not give migrants the ability to work, to not give migrants a welcome, is serious. It is a sin.”
“In the Old Testament,” he recalled, “there is a refrain: the orphan, the widow and the stranger— that is, the migrant. They are the three that the people of Israel must protect. The one who does not protect the migrant is failing. It is a sin. It’s also a sin against the life of those people.”
“I celebrated Mass at the border, close to the Diocese of El Paso,” the pope said. “And there were many shoes of migrants who ended badly there.” He was referring to his visit to Mexico in February 2016, when he celebrated Mass in Ciudad Juárez, as people from El Paso prayed on the U.S. side of the border wall. Before that Mass, a priest from Ciudad Juárez had placed worn migrants’ shoes at the foot of a cross facing the bridges that span the Rio Grande.
“Today,” he said, “there is a flow of migrants in Central America, who often are treated like slaves.”
Francis, the son of Italian migrants to Argentina, emphasized that “immigration is a right, a right that is in sacred Scripture, and it was in the Old Testament: the stranger, the orphan and the widow. Don’t forget that. That’s what I think on migrants.”
Turning to the question of abortion, Francis was equally forthright. He said, “Science says that a month after conception all of the organs of a human being are there. All of them.”
Therefore, he said, “[t]o have an abortion is to kill a human being. You may like the word, or you don’t like it, but it is to kill…. The church does not permit abortion. Why? Because it is to kill, it’s an assassination. It’s an assassination, and we must have things clear on this.”
He then returned to the rejection of migrants. “To send migrants away, to not allow them to develop, to not allow them to have life, is a bad thing. It is evil.” Likewise, he said, “To send away a child from the womb of the mother is an assassination because there is life.”
He added: “We must speak about these things clearly…. There are no ‘buts.’ Both things are clear.” He again reminded people not to overlook “the orphan, the stranger and the widow.”
The U.S. journalist, however, persisted in the topic and asked, “In your view, your holiness, are there circumstances in which it is morally licit for a Catholic to vote for a candidate who is in favor of abortion?
The Jesuit pope did not provide a yes-or-no answer. Instead, he responded: “In the moral [teaching] about politics, in general, it is said that to not vote is bad. It is not good. You must vote, and one has to choose the lesser evil.”
In this situation, he asked, “What is the lesser evil? That woman, or that man?” He said: “I don’t know. Each one, in their conscience, must think and [vote].”
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