Theologian says one-issue voting is foreign to Catholic tradition

Published: 2004-10-25

NEW YORK (CNS) -- In an article in America, a national Catholic magazine published by the Jesuits, a Fordham University moral theologian said it is foreign to the church's moral tradition to claim that one issue alone, even abortion, should determine how a voter votes. The theologian, Father Thomas R. Kopfensteiner, took issue with bishops who have argued that a voter facing a candidate who supports keeping abortion legal and one who opposes it must always choose the one who opposes it. "This naive approach to the formation of conscience fails to consider the likely success of a candidate's platform to limit the wrongdoing in either the near or distant future," he wrote in the Nov. 1 issue of America, which appeared about a week before Election Day. Father Kopfensteiner, a priest of the St. Louis Archdiocese, has taught at Jesuit-run Fordham University in New York since 1996. He also taught for eight years at Kenrick School of Theology in St. Louis and has also been a visiting professor at the Gregorian University in Rome, where he earned his doctorate.

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