It's Time To Heal The Wounds Of Political Discord

In these last few months, many people in our Catholic community have experienced the pain of having personal and professional relationships strained and even torn apart by angry political discord. A friend of mine recently confided that she blocked many of her parish friends on Facebook because their political posts were causing her so much stress.

“It’s like our very souls are being judged on this one decision,” she said. “We’re either good Christians or evil heathens depending on which causes we decided to stand up for.  It just seems unfair that we are all being demonized for having to make such a difficult choice.”

My friend’s words reminded me of a tragic movie that I watched years ago, and have never been able to forget.  The title of the movie was “Sophie’s Choice.”  It is the story of a polish immigrant woman who is haunted by a decision she made at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust.

A German soldier forced Sophie to choose which one of her two children would be gassed and which would proceed to the labor camp. To avoid having both children killed, she chose her son to be sent to the children's camp and her daughter to be sent to her death. Sophie never recovered from the trauma of having to choose between her two children.

After watching the movie, I spent a sleepless night tossing and turning as the tragic scene from the concentration camp played over and over again in my mind.  At the time, I had a young son and a baby daughter of my own and could not imagine being told that I could only save one of them.  How can any of us weigh one precious human life against another and choose between them?

I believe most people would agree that when we Catholics enter the voting booth, we can’t vote in favor of all of the human-rights issues that our Catholic faith demands that we care about. All of us who vote with our consciences carry the images of sacred human life with us into the voting booth.  

We carry the images of unborn babies and drowning refugee children. We carry the images of endangered police officers and endangered inner city youth. We carry the images of desperate coal miners and desperate immigrants, both crying out for decent lives for their children.  We are forced to choose from among these images because we cannot choose them all, any more than Sophie could choose to save both of her children. It may help us to begin healing our relationships (both online and offline), if we look upon each other’s difficult choices with compassion instead of judgement.  Maybe those of us on both sides could even go so far as to thank each other for standing up in defense of those people and those issues that our own vote forced us to sacrifice.  

By voting differently, conservative and liberal Catholics manage to do together what we can never do alone. It takes a very diverse Catholic community to defend the sacredness of all human life.