In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Gloria Purvis spoke with Sam Sawyer, S.J., the editor in chief of America, as part of a special mini-series of “The Gloria Purvis Podcast.” What follows is an excerpt of that conversation, in which they discuss the formation of conscience, choosing between flawed candidates and how to weigh the grave evils of abortion and racism when it comes time to vote.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Gloria Purvis: What does the church mean when she talks about having a properly formed conscience?
Sam Sawyer, S.J.: Conscience is not just a purely emotional experience or a brute fact. Conscience is something that grows and develops in us. When [you told the story of taking] that pencil as a young child [as an example of conscience], you knew that something was wrong about it, but you probably couldn’t have explained fully what was wrong about it. Now you’d be able to refer to the concept of stealing, the commandment against stealing. You’d be able to talk about the fact that you’ve deprived somebody else of the use of that [pencil].
It’s a very small example, but it comes from the formation of conscience. So when we talk about the formation of conscience, we mean both the process of coming to understand those instinctive responses of conscience more deeply but also the conversation with God directly in prayer and with the teaching of the church over time.
The resources that the church offers us in the catechism, in the teachings of the magisterium, the resources that God offers us in Scripture and in the word of God, and the examples of the lives of the saints—all of these we’re called upon to take the time to learn carefully. There are some things, particularly in the church’s moral teaching, that we have a responsibility as Catholics to learn and to integrate into our own lives.
GP: As Catholics, there’s no political party where we are perfectly at home. So already from the outset, we have to make some judgments about who we are going to support. Some of the bigger issues that have been talked about as of late have been abortion and immigration—I know the Holy Father talked about that recently. But I want to add something else that is very near and dear to my heart: that is abortion and racism. And I don’t think in the United States racism even rises to the top of what people would consider a pre-eminent issue. So when people say things like abortion is a “pre-eminent issue,” what does that mean?
SS: That language about abortion being the “pre-eminent priority” comes from a document that the U.S. bishops have issued in every recent election cycle called “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.” What the bishops mean by that phrase is that, as they look in their judgment at the U.S. political landscape, they have seen abortion as an issue that rises to the point where we always have to be thinking about it. We always have to think about it because the failure to recognize the equal dignity of unborn human life is such a basic moral issue and so deeply shapes the way we analyze the political and moral and legal landscape.
GP: What you said sets me up nicely to explain why racism really matters. I have to think about it every day, whether I want to or not because it is a matter of survival. As a woman, an abortion is something I have to go out and seek. Nobody’s waiting outside my house to jump me and force me to have an abortion. Racism is something I have absolutely no control over. I don’t know if I’m going to walk out of the house and, for example, get pulled over by police and shot. That’s a real experience of Black people in this country. Yet oftentimes I have seen conversations in which we are told to forget that issue in favor of abortion if we are good Catholics. And let me just say: No, that’s not true.
I think it also goes into how in some cases, people’s experiences inform what they see as a priority, morally, for them to make decisions. How would you walk us through that?
SS: One of the first things I would say and have said is you should listen to Gloria Purvis about this. I’ve pointed people to the beautiful talk you gave in Indianapolis at the Eucharistic Congress identifying racism as a core moral issue and something that we need to be attentive to because it impacts how we are able to be the body of Christ, with and for each other.
For me and a number of other white Catholics, the murder of George Floyd and the protests in 2020 were really a moment of recognizing that truth at a deeper and more profound level, of coming to understand what was actually happening to our Black brothers and sisters. So I think step one [is] just listen to the people who actually live the experience, especially listen to the people who live that experience and are able to speak faithfully about what it means to their witness to Jesus Christ.
About the language of pre-eminent priority, I would say, if we’re going to read the bishops on that, we should read them fully. In “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” the bishops talk about two temptations that can distort the church’s defense of human life and dignity. The first temptation, they say, is a moral equivalence that makes no ethical distinctions between different kinds of issues. So if you just [take] racism, poverty, immigration, abortion and lay them out on a table and tally them up and see who gets more check marks at the end—they say that’s a temptation that distorts.
But the second temptation that distorts, they say, is the misuse of these necessary moral distinctions as a way of dismissing or ignoring other serious threats to human life and dignity. So if you set out in a moral discussion to say, “Well, no, we’ve got some ranking of moral issues that came from somewhere, and I get to ignore racism because I tripped over abortion first on my way into the voting booth today,” then that’s also a distortion of our witness to human life and dignity. It’s not a sufficient answer. It cannot be a fully and deeply, properly formed conscience that is telling you to ignore something as fundamental and as sinful as racism.
GP: In our current election cycle, I see specific racist sloganeering that seems to go unchallenged. And I’ll give an example: the claim that Haitians engage in dog and cat eating. And I see Catholics who repeat that lie.
And I keep saying, how is it that we as Catholics, who say we believe in the dignity of the human person from the womb to the tomb, are so uncritical in the face of such blatant lies and so timid in rejecting it and calling it out? But at the same time, I think people would say, “But you as a public Catholic, you need to be sort of neutral.” But I don’t want to be neutral in the face of things that are so clearly against what we believe.
SS: I do think there’s a duty, certainly I feel the duty as a member of the clergy, [to call out such statements]. And I think there’s a similar duty when people are speaking publicly on behalf of the church to strive, for prudential reasons, to avoid endorsing specific parties or specific candidates and seeming to give them the blessing or the authorization of the church. It is not the church’s role to dictate the voice of conscience to people; people have to hear that voice of conscience themselves.
That said, the terrible lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio—they may have started off as some kind of misunderstanding or misinformation, but then they were perpetuated deliberately because they helped get people angry and scared and thus more ready to move in one political direction than another.
There’s nothing at all to justify that. It is the use of dehumanizing language against vulnerable people in order to score political points. [It is important] to call out very clearly what is evil about this. And what is evil about it is that it’s dehumanizing but also that it’s dehumanizing in this very specific racist way that we’ve seen over and over again.
GP: One of the things that I have been grappling with is: How is it that we are so conditioned that we don’t just immediately say, “That is racist”? This language of avoidance regarding racism has left us vulnerable when people do racist sloganeering. And sometimes it’s exhausting to be the one to always have to call it out—to try to walk through why this is so evil and why this is a problem, and why if we care about the human person, we should be disgusted by this sloganeering and the harm that it does to us as a human family. It’s just the worst thing. Yet I’m told abortion—that is more important.
SS: I think there’s a connection between these issues in the sense that, as you said: Why do we avoid the language that calls it out directly? I think anyone who is seriously pro-life and has been involved in pro-life political spaces has felt the frustration over this very elliptical, sanded-down language about abortion that will not speak directly about the identity and dignity of unborn human life in the womb. [They] will talk about it clinically or will describe something in just very generic terms rather than saying clearly that there are two human lives at stake: the life of the pregnant woman and the life of the unborn child at whatever stage of development. Until we can say that clearly we can’t possibly be having the real moral discussion.
Similarly, I would say on racism, if we cannot clearly call comments like the ones we heard about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield racist, then we are not having a real moral conversation yet. Where instead we’re sanding it down to something that we can feel more comfortable with. And if we’re doing that in order to feel better about continuing to support a candidate we already support for some reason, your conscience ought to be screaming at you. If your conscience isn’t screaming at you, my advice would be, well go pray and, and listen harder. Because God might be saying something that you’re not quite ready to hear yet.
