Texas Bishops’ Guidelines Encourage Use of Faithful Citizenship Resources, Discourage Voter’s Guides

By Jennifer Carr-Allmon, Associate Director of the Texas Catholic Conference

Tomorrow is the last day to register to vote.  That means that an onslaught of voter’s guides is headed your way.  Now that organizations are finished with their voter’s registration drives they will shift their attention to voter education.  For those in ministry in the church, this is a good time to review the TCC Guidelines on political activity.

Recently a national Christian organization sent a voter’s guide to all pastors in Texas.  Unfortunately, this guide and others like it are not appropriate for distribution in our parishes.  The TCC discourages the distribution of voter’s guides in Catholic parishes and ministries.  Most guides fail to account for the full teaching of the church and fail to adequately address complex issues.  Often this is because the organization that has created the guide evaluates the candidates rather than allowing the voter to objectively evaluate them.   This approach fails to recognize the conscience of the individual because it subjectively prioritizes issues and often presents candidates that agree with the organization’s goals in a positive light.  Some guides are in fact misleading in their intent and oversimplify a particular vote on a bill.

Many people ask why the TCC does not distribute our own guide or at least publish a report of the record votes of incumbents.  The primary reason is that it is not our role to evaluate political candidates or officeholders.   It is our role to form consciences on the issues, which is why we have published policy papers on every priority on our Legislative Agenda.  In addition, record votes can be misleading.  For example, a representative may have a perfect record of voting with TCC when our bills are on the floor for vote, but that same representative may sabotage bills in the back hall or by using procedures to avoid a floor vote.  For these reasons, TCC recommends the use of the U.S. Bishops’ document on Faithful Citizenship for use in helping Catholics form their consciences in light of the Gospel and the moral and social teaching of the Church.

From the TCC Guidelines:

•  Materials prepared for use in educating citizens, including surveys or polls, must emphasize educational objectives and not support or oppose specific candidates or parties. All materials should be approved by USCCB, TCC, or the local diocesan Bishop.
• Evaluations of candidates or political parties should be avoided. Examples of objectionable evaluations would be:
  • Those that encourage readers or listeners (e.g., homily) to vote for or against a particular candidate or party;
  • Those which label a candidate or party as “pro-school choice” or “anti-life”; such a practice removes objectivity by not allowing readers to evaluate a candidate’s position themselves;
  • Those which use plus or minus signs to evaluate the candidate or party;
  • Rating Candidates or parties on a scale of “one to ten” for example, or otherwise saying “X is good,” “Y” is better”;
  • Those which use marked sample ballots.

Click here to read the TCC Guidelines for Pastors and Parishes on Advocacy and Political Participation (opens as a PDF) or you can view them below. Click here to read the Guidelines en Español. You can find more resources on Faithful Citizenship here.