Trump vs. Clinton: What's a Catholic to do

The Catholic seminarians who gather for dinner
every evening in the dining hall at The Athenaeum of Ohio would rather talk about something else.
Theology or philosophy. Sports. Music. The weather.
Anything, really, but the presidential election.
Yet there it is, every day, impossible to avoid. One candidate who embraces a stand on abortion rights that their Catholic faith considers “intrinsically evil,” and another whose words and actions go against centuries of church teachings on morality and human dignity.
So as they gather around the table, picking at their salads and sandwiches, these future priests struggle with the same question that millions of other American Catholics are asking around their dinner tables this election year.
What are you going to do?
“That’s what I hear, more than anything else,” said the Rev. David Endres, dean of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary at the Athenaeum, in Anderson Township. “They’re sometimes unsure of what would be the moral choice.”
This is a challenging election for many Americans, regardless of their faith. But for Catholics, who now make up more than one-fifth of the U.S. population, it poses fundamental questions about the intersection of their religious and political lives

Catholicism has never fit neatly into one political ideology or party. The church swings to the right on abortion and “sanctity of life” issues, which it places above all others, and to the left on immigration, race relations and poverty.
Reconciling those views in the voting booth can be difficult in any year for Catholics, but it’s especially so this year.

“It’s a tough time,” said John Carr, director of Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life. “Personally, I feel politically homeless.”
The problem, he said, is that both major-party candidates so often take positions faithful Catholics find offensive.

Democrat Hillary Clinton gets a black mark for her support of legal abortion and a national health care law that church leaders consider a threat to religious freedom.
Republican Donald Trump mocks the disabled, favors a religious test for Muslims, wants to build a wall to keep out illegal immigrants and has been accused of groping multiple women.
It’s a conundrum. And even the most serious and scholarly Catholics, like those wrestling with their choices in the seminary, have no easy answer.

“They’re both a wash, morally speaking,” said Alexander Witt, a seminarian who expects to become a priest next year. “They’re both terrible people.”