Question:
Answer:
A Catholic must be a Catholic. The categories of conservative and liberal are loose, and Catholic positions, at least in the United States, could fall on either side, depending on the issue. There really are no longer any Catholic political parties in Europe, except perhaps in some countries such as Poland or Slovakia. But in the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, there have never been any parties that present a fully Catholic perspective. So Catholics must choose based on their prudent judgment of which parties or candidates are most compatible with Christian moral teaching.
This may not be as easy as it seems. For example: dropping an atomic bomb is the deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants—that is, innocent civilians—and is intrinsically wrong according to Catholic teaching. And yet you can find “pro-life” politicians and citizens who oppose abortion as the deliberate taking of innocent life but who try to justify the use of atomic weapons of mass destruction. The fact that most “pro-life” politicians would justify atomic weapons shows how hard it is to have a completely Catholic political profile in our country.
There are other issues that are also debatable from the Catholic point of view, but the life issues are the most obvious. In voting and in party allegiance, we simply have to do the best we can, trying sincerely to follow the whole teaching of the Church on the issues that face our society.