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Or: On the Moral Permissibility of Militant Abstentionism
Universal suffrage rather deserves the name of universal folly and, when secret societies take hold of it, as happens too often, of universal lie.
—Pope Pius IX to French pilgrims in 1874[1]
Archbishop Vigano’s letter
As the dust settles after President Trump’s decisive election victory on November 5th and the heightened emotional state of the general public – purposefully whipped up by the Regime media on both sides – subsides to a more regular level, it behoves American Catholics to reflect on what the 2024 elections mean for the cause of the Kingship of Christ and the fight for Christian Civilisation; the establishment of which is the obligation of all lay Catholics everywhere, including the United States. These elections were groundbreaking in several ways: they marked the first time that the Republican Party openly cast aside its official commitment to life and marriage and they occurred after the Covid pseudo-pandemic – which conclusively demonstrated that both the Left and Right sides of the power structure can and will enforce the most unscientific and unconstitutional lies and policies, to the detriment of the common good, in the service of a global plutocracy.
On the eve of the 2024 Presidential Election, the always politically-forthright Archbishop Viganò released an open letter to American Catholics where he claimed that it was “not morally possible” for Catholics to abstain from voting; that American Catholics are called to choose between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and slavery, and that voting for Donald Trump was “the only possible choice to counter the globalist coup that the woke Left is about to implement definitively, irreparably, and with incalculable damage for future generations.”
In this essay I will attempt to refute Archbishop Viganò’s claims that abstention was morally impermissible and offer the criticism that Viganò frames his argument according to modern, Liberal categories which are outside Catholic Tradition and which serve to obscure Catholics’ clear thinking regarding the whole issue of political activity under Liberal ‘democratic’ regimes. This is as relevant to American Catholics – and indeed Catholics the world over, under the anti-Catholic, Liberal “democratic” order – as it was on the day of the American election.
Today, we encounter a plethora of short-sighted readings of the current state of affairs, trapped in Manichean frameworks imported from the gringo world that reduce everything to a choice between Liberty and Marxism. This grotesque strategy emerged from US foreign policy decades ago.
—Miguel Quesada[2]
Those who claim that Catholics have a ‘moral obligation to vote for Trump’ – or any other candidate in this Liberal order – generally do so based on several unexamined presuppositions:
- The political system is as it presents itself; namely a ‘Constitutional Republic’ and democracy, rather than a crypto-oligarchy.
- The ‘Deep State’ is purely a ‘Left-wing’ phenomenon.
- The corresponding globalist threat is of a Marxist, Masonic, Satanic character.
- That Donald Trump in particular, and the Republican Party in general, are not ‘hostile to religion.’
We should begin by pointing out, as the popes have taught for generations, both the so-called Right and Left, share the same Liberal principles of origin and the same purpose of destruction of the natural and Christian social order. Plentiful experience shows that such a Liberal system inexorably leads to the degeneration of customs, deterioration of morals and growing disorder in all aspects of social life. We should not forget this, whatever the emotionally charged atmosphere of a particular moment. Contrary to Viganò’s claims that Trump offers a kind of ‘protective umbrella’ for Catholics to practice their faith, he omits that ‘religious liberty’ (the foundation stone of all Liberal regimes) is itself intrinsically hostile to true religion. To affirm ‘religious liberty’ is to deny the Great Commission; Christ’s mandate to ‘baptise all nations’.
The basis of political action is a coherent and sober apprehension of reality as it is, rather than action following a false grasp of reality based on what people might feverishly wish were the case. To take a recent example, how many Catholic YouTube hours were wasted inferring from vague symbols, rumours, and assumptions that Melania Trump was some kind of conduit for the Fatima message into the first Trump administration? I recall various Q-flavoured claims that she had even ordered an exorcism of the White House after the Obamas departed. In the weeks before the election, the former nude-model instead revealed that she fully believes in the right to infanticide and even invoked the blasphemous and anti-Eucharistic slogan of that Anti-Mary cause.
Lesser of two evils argument
Politically, the weakness of the argument of the lesser evil has always been that those who choose the lesser evil very quickly forget that they have chosen evil.
—Hannah Arendt[3]
It is necessary to address the claim, widely circulated, that Catholics are, always and everywhere, obligated to vote for the political candidate who represents ‘the lesser of two evils’ in the political arena. Confusion around Catholic teaching on voting has spread partly as a result of Vatican II when the Novus Ordo hierarchy affirmed the ‘compatibility’ between Liberalism and Catholicism. The Modernists consider democracy, and the right to vote, as sacrosanct, an immediate consequence of human dignity, directly connected with their humanistic religion.
It is true that in 1948, when the Communist Party was threatening to seize power in Italy, Pope Pius XII instructed Italian clergy: “In the present circumstances it is strictly obligatory for whoever has the right, man or woman, to take part in the elections.” Similarly, when some French Catholics failed to vote in the elections of 1951, several members of the French hierarchy issued statements condemning such indifference. We should be careful, however, of conflating the political circumstances of 1940s and 1950s Europe with 2020s America which Jackson seems to do (his main secondary source is an American priest from the 1950s, when the American Empire was waging an ideological war with Communism – now the American Empire has been called Marxist on the right and the left).
Among pre-eminent pre-conciliar moral theologians, the teaching regarding voting between two candidates who are both of evil principles (as Harris and Trump manifestly were) is of a different category. In the hypothetical choice between a Liberal and a Communist for example, a Catholic may vote for the Liberal, applying the law of double effect, but is not obligated to as Viganò and Jackson claim.
Tanquery[4] and Prümmer[5] write that the Catholic may vote for the lesser evil, but he should publicly declare why he is voting this way, to avoid scandal. Lehmkuhl adds that there must be no approbation of the unworthy man or of his programme.[6] In my mind this is a moral line which not only Viganò has clearly crossed in his letter – saying Trump can make America “great and prosperous again” (nonsense – America cannot be ‘great again’ because she never was great, since she was never constitutionally Catholic) – but also many other traditional Catholic commentators, podcasters and leaders who have rushed to heap inordinate and effusive praise on the infanticide-supporting Donald Trump and his notorious dissenting-Catholic running-mate JD Vance. Some claimed in 2020 that Trump was “entirely on our side on the life issue.”
Only between two candidates without absolute impediments—which today are impossible to find—could the dilemma of the lesser evil arise, making it entirely prudent to vote or not for one of them.
—Rodrigo Fernández Diez[7]
Viganò forgets the Aristotelian maxim according to which the end determines the means, the good fruits of the bad end being per accidens, and not per se. Yes, Donald Trump may arouse apparent indignant opposition from the ‘woke Left’ but it does not follow that he represents ‘freedom’ (truly understood) or ‘democracy,’ far less Christian civilisation. A prolonged exposure to ‘lesser evil’ makes the lesser evil more and more serious. Catholics who support them are at risk of becoming assimilated to all the evils promoted by the Right-wing such as individualism, the materialist vision of the world, usury, Zionism and religious indifferentism (state Atheism without the name). Viganò’s chief error is therefore to employ the rhetorical categories of Liberalism (imported from the contemporary theatrical Right-wing milieu), rather than cite the teaching of the Magisterium or theologians. Chris Jackson makes a more serious case.
The Argentine priest Father Castellani used to say that between two evils the right thing is not to choose, whenever one has the possibility.[8] If there are no worthy candidates, then one may abstain. By enthusiastically participating in the ‘democratic system’ Catholics risk becoming assimilated to the system of lies. Given the nonexistence of a party opposed to Liberalism, militant abstention is a morally permissible option and may, in fact, be the best option for Catholics.
Alternatives for American Catholics
Ed Feser has discussed the psychological implications of unequivocal Catholic support for Trump. Contrary to Viganò’s illogical claims that a “massive Catholic vote of confidence” will send a message to Trump that he should embrace “a more incisive commitment to defence of life,” rather the message has been given to the Republican party that there is no political cost to embracing a pro-infanticide and pro-Sodom position. As Feser points out, American Catholics are now in a position whereby Republican politicians can take the Catholic vote for granted because of the ‘lesser evil argument,’ so long as their platform remains a fraction less disordered than the Democrats, while continuing a course of action that will lead to the systemic collapse of our morally disordered civilisation in our lifetime.
He who knows the other and knows himself will not be defeated in a hundred battles; he who does not know the other but knows himself will be victorious half the time; he who does not know the other any more than he knows himself will always be defeated.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The Catholic economist Thomas Storck offered an alternative political strategy for American Catholics in 2004 in the New Oxford Review:
If we Catholics really wanted to have an effect on U.S. politics, the best means would be a strategy selectively to abstain from voting so as to serve notice to politicians that, until they come to us with a platform reasonably in conformity with the entire range of Catholic teaching, they could not expect our votes. Play hard to get and let them come courting… There are enough American Catholics to make them earn our votes; we need not be running after one politician or another who mouths agreement with Catholic teaching on this or that issue.[9]
This strategy advocated by Storck echoes that maintained by the Carlist Traditional Communion in the Hispanic world:
In the current situation, it is false that there is only the possibility of voting for one of the majority parties: it is also possible to torpedo the system with a militant abstentionism that, not to be confused with apathetic abstention, must be accompanied by political action and effective propaganda. And, today, this last possibility is the lesser evil in almost all regions. Troublesome, yes, but also morally obligatory.
—Political Secretariat of His Royal Highness Don Sixto Enrique de Borbón[10]
Here the Traditional Communion articulates an important political truth that Viganò and many others neglect in the febrile spectacle of the current moment. As Catholics, we don’t want to carve out a ‘space’ in the Liberal system, we want to replace the system entirely. As Aristotle taught, the end is last in execution, but first in the intention of reason.
And to those who say, what on earth can the Catholic minority of the United States achieve politically, numbering just 22% of the population (the truly faithful share of this number of course being much smaller) just look at the political influence the far smaller Jewish minority (2.4%) has achieved without the power of the Sacraments If they were united and faithful then American Catholics could change the country. As Gabriel Garcia Moreno – one of the greatest modern Catholic statesmen – once said: “one man and God is a majority!”
[1] Pius IX to French Pilgrims on May 5th, 1874, quoted by Adrien Loubier, Démocratie cléricale [Clerical Democracy], 100.
[2] Quesada, M. (2024, October 28). The Errors of Anti-Communism. Retrieved from La Esperanza: https://periodicolaesperanza.com/archivos/25713
[3] H. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement,J.-L. Fidel, Trans. (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2009), 45.
[4] A. Lehmkuhl, Compendium theologiae moralis (n.d.), 981, cited by Rev. Titus Cranny http://www.catholicapologetics.info/morality/general/voting.htm
[5] Ibid., 601.
[6] Ibid., 343.
[7] Diez, R. F. (2024, May 29). Elections and the Lesser Evil. Retrieved from La Esperanza: https://periodicolaesperanza.com/archivos/24036
[8] Castellani, F. L. (1958, February). The Lesser Evil. Retrieved from Pilgrim of the Absolute: https://peregrinodeloabsoluto.wordpress.com/2023/08/23/el-mal-menor/
[9] Storck, T. (2004, Oxford). Catholic Voters: Play Hard to Get. Retrieved from New Oxford Review: https://www.newoxfordreview.org/documents/catholic-voters-play-hard-to-get/
[10] Political Secretariat of HRH Don Sixto Enrique de Borbón. (2022, November 5). The Militant Abstentionism of the Traditionalist Communion. Retrieved from La Esperanza: https://periodicolaesperanza.com/archivos/15259
