In an election campaign that has so far been characterised by negativity and by the avoidance of commitment to any principle that might cost votes, the Australian Bishops' advice on voting is welcome. It avoided bagging particular political parties, enunciated broad humane criteria that should guide voters in their decisions, and pointed to issues that Catholic agencies regarded as central in the election.
Those who pondered the letter would find material for calm reflection on what matters. For the Bishops what mattered clearly were human beings and policies based on the kind of familiarity with their lives that comes from personal contact.
After reading the letter I wondered whether there may be room for church leaders to offer a little more guidance. Without attacking political parties, might they also ask more detailed questions about the conduct of the election and of party policies in the light of the principles they enunciated in the letter?
I would personally have liked to see the criteria more deeply grounded in the issues attributed to Catholic agencies owned by the Bishops on behalf of all Catholics, and some questions raised about the fit between the criteria and the policies of the parties on these issues.
The criteria stated by the letter are interesting because they are framed as human rights: the right to adequate food, shelter, to human dignity, to contribute to society and so on. Churches have sometimes been critical of human rights language. But rights need grounding, something that churches have long experience in providing. A little more reflection on the grounding of human rights would have tightened the list of criteria.
The first criterion suggested it is the right of every person to human dignity. But human dignity is not strictly a right, but an endowment. Because human beings are ends in themselves and are precious, they have a unique and inalienable dignity. Their dignity grounds the other rights, which spell out what it means to treat people in a way that respects their human dignity.
This point is important to make in the present election because the rhetoric of both major parties and the media implicitly presents human dignity, not as an inalienable quality of all human beings, but as something that depends on accidents of birth, of race, of nationality or of compliant behaviour. Those who are not of our nationality and do not follow our ways can be treated as