The Papal Vote

Pope Leo XIV’s absentee vote in the midterm election suggests a blurring of the boundaries between the sacred and the profane with little precedent in the history of the Roman Catholic Church — or America. “The Holy Father expresses his belief in the right and the duty of citizens to participate in democratic processes,” the Vatican said. Could, though, the pope’s engagement with the hurly-burly of electoral politics impinge on the dignity of the throne of St. Peter?Pope Leo hardly shies from political debate. He has emerged as a critic of the war against Iran, and the Trump administration’s policy of enforcing immigration laws. He decried his home state, Illinois, for legalizing assisted suicide. “I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel,” he has averred. By voting, too, the pope is exercising the influence any citizen has over politics via the ballot box.The pontiff looks to be within his legal rights. The pope’s role as the ruler of another nation, the Holy See, may raise novel questions, muses an analyst of international law, Edmarverson Santos. “Can the head of a sovereign state vote in another country’s elections without compromising its international neutrality?” Mr. Santos asks, noting that Leo’s does not seem to reflect “the exercise of Vatican governmental authority.”Nor does the Constitution appear to pose any bar to the pope’s vote. Article I, Section 9 holds that “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Then the parchment states that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under” the United States “shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”So it looks to us like the pope’s decision to cast a ballot marks a vindication of liberal democracy and an acknowledgement of the power of a citizen’s vote. This political calculus is all the more remarkable because the pope occupies a platform that rivals the American president’s “bully pulpit,” as Theodore Roosevelt termed it. When the pope speaks at Rome, he addresses his remarks “urbi et orbi” — “to the city and the world.”No doubt some of Leo’s papal predecessors would have looked askance at the idea of a pontiff voting — not to mention democracy itself. For centuries, when the Bishop of Rome ruled the Papal States, the prospect would never have arisen. With the rise of the modern Italian state in 1870, the popes lost their secular realm and became, for decades, so-called prisoners of the Vatican. Only in 1929 with the Lateran Treaty was some papal territory restored.This tension with Italy led the papacy to maintain, for decades, a policy of barring Italian Catholics from participating in secular politics. Nineteenth-century popes were critical more broadly of the rise of liberal democracy and popular elections in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Gregory XVI called free speech “injurious babbling” and lamented that under elected governments “depravity exults; science is impudent; liberty, dissolute.” Pius IX rejected the idea that a pope “can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” Vatican II moderated such views in an effort to reconcile Rome and modernity. Older popes, in contrast to the incumbent pontiff, subscribed to the biblical injunction to “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”

The Papal Vote

The Papal Vote

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