Faithful Catholics and the midterms: what to do?

On Tuesday, Nov. 8, Americans will return to the polls. U.S. elections can be really dirty battlegrounds — and for orthodox Catholics the sense that something has gone seriously wrong with society is overpowering.

Secular progressives, some of them identifying as Catholics, want to outlaw some of our most sacred freedoms — not just free speech but, unbelievably, the right of unborn babies to live. Meanwhile, a much smaller group of Catholics, the so-called Integralists, are wasting our time by drawing up fantasy plans for an authoritarian state that will supposedly restore Christian values.

It’s disheartening, but it’s precisely at moments like these that we American Catholics need to bring our deepest beliefs into the public square.