WASHINGTON (OSV News) — Republicans in the U.S. House rejected their own party’s funding bill shortly before a looming deadline to avert a government shutdown.
Also, a U.S. bishop expanded on Pope Francis’ comments about the upcoming election in a video message, and Georgetown University hosted a summit on democracy.
House kills Johnson’s spending bill after Republican defections
The House Sept. 18 rejected a $1.6 trillion stopgap spending bill to fund the government into March while adding new proof-of-citizenship requirements on voter registration, known as the SAVE Act, as a group of Republicans joined Democrats to derail a proposal by House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to avert a looming shutdown.
Fourteen Republicans joined nearly all Democrats in voting against the spending plan, after Johnson yanked the same funding legislation the previous week amid internal party divisions over whether to pass a continuing resolution or what should be in it.
But combining the funding legislation with the SAVE Act would be rejected by the Democratic- controlled Senate, and Senate Republicans have expressed concern that a government shutdown shortly before the election would harm their party’s chances in November.
But their presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, has suggested Republicans should shut down the government over the bill.
“If Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a Continuing Resolution in any way, shape, or form,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.
Unless House Republicans change course, the Senate is expected to advance a spending bill without any policy riders that would fund the government through December.
Bishop Paprocki responds to Pope Francis’ comments about the upcoming election
Aboard the papal plane Sept. 13, in response to a question about how a U.S. Catholic should navigate an election given a choice between voting for a person who supports abortion or one who supports closing borders and deporting migrants, Pope Francis said one must choose “the lesser evil.”
“Who is the ‘lesser evil’ that woman or that man?” the pope said in reference to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. “I do not know. Each person must think and decide in his or her conscience.”
The pope described both candidates as having positions that “are against life: the one who wants to throw out the migrants and the one who kills children.”
Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, said in a Sept. 17 video message that the pontiff sought to address a nuanced topic in a few short minutes, but said the idea one must choose between the lesser of two evils is best understood as a context in which there are only two choices. However, a Catholic voter in the U.S. is not limited to only major party candidates, but could in theory choose to support a third-party or write-in candidate in good conscience, he said, since they are “not necessarily locked in to two options.”
“So I know some people are feeling they’re having a really hard time choosing between the two candidates and the major political parties,” he said. “There is an option for people to do a write-in candidate.”
Bishop Paprocki, who has been critical of President Joe Biden for his public advocacy for abortion despite being Catholic, cited the American Solidarity Party as an example of a potential pro-life third-party choice one could make.
“So people might say, ‘Well you’re wasting your vote if you do that,'” he continued. “Well, you’re voting according to your beliefs, you know, and so it’s a way of making a statement if that’s what people choose to do.”
Bishop Paprocki noted the U.S. bishops’ teaching document “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” is meant to advise Catholic voters on how to apply church teaching to the decisions they make in the ballot box.
That same document identifies abortion as the bishops’ “pre-eminent priority because it directly attacks our most vulnerable and voiceless brothers and sisters and destroys more than a million lives per year in our country alone,” while listing other “grave threats to the life and dignity of the human person” including euthanasia, gun violence, terrorism, the death penalty and human trafficking. Threats “to religious freedom at home and abroad, lack of justice for the poor, the suffering of migrants and refugees, wars and famines around the world, racism, the need for greater access to healthcare and education, care for our common home” were also listed among threats to the dignity of the human person.
While Harris has made expanding abortion access a key part of her pitch to voters, Trump has indicated he would veto federal abortion restrictions if they reached his desk as president.
Georgetown hosts summit on democracy
Christian leaders from across the nation gathered for a summit hosted by the Georgetown Center on Faith and Justice. At the Sept. 19-20 summit, “Test of Faith: A Summit to Defend Democracy,” the Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners and director of the Georgetown Center on Faith and Justice, aimed to foster interfaith dialogue “to address critical threats to democracy, including unveiling a theologically centered Christian defense of democracy,” the school said in a press release.
Speakers included Sister Simone Campbell, a Sister of Social Service and former executive director of Network; Sherrilyn Iffil of the Howard University School of Law; and Bishop Michael Curry of the Episcopal Church.
At a Sept. 19 roundtable ahead of the start of the summit, participants issued a statement signed by about 200 representatives from Catholic, evangelical, mainline Protestant, Orthodox and Black churches.
Citing Scripture, the statement outlines “a set of commitments,” according to a news release. They include “opposition to voter suppression; the rejection of intimidation of election administrators, poll workers or voters; the repudiation of Christian nationalism and efforts to privilege one population over others; and denouncing misinformation and disinformation.”
Kate Scanlon is a national reporter for OSV News covering Washington. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @kgscanlon.
