Pope Francis waded into the U.S. presidential elections during his press conference on the flight back to Rome on Septem-ber 13, saying of the choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, “One must choose the lesser of two evils. Who is the lesser of two evils? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know.
“They are both against life. The one who throws away the migrants as well as the one who kills children,” the pope said. “Both are against life.” Trump has indicated he plans a mass deportation of migrants if he regains the White House, and Harris has promised to try and restore abortion rights nationwide if she is promoted by voters.
Pope Francis said Catholics had to form their consciences when deciding for whom to vote. The U.S. bishops, in adopting a new introductory statement to their quadrennial document on voting, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship”, were less even-handed in their app-raisal of the two major political parties. Last year, they voted to state that abortion is “our pre-eminent priority” in the 2024 election, repeating phrasing first used in the 2020 version of the statement. Previous iterations of the document had refrained from such explicit emphasis on one issue, because that level of specificity is precisely where conscience formation is required. It is not clear that this year’s federal elections will have any consequence on national abortion policy, given the evenly divided Congress, so making that issue a priority strikes many observers as odd.