Seeds of Justice

A Catholic Approach to the 2026 Midterm Elections

Midterm elections may attract less attention than presidential elections. Still, they shape decisions that affect our everyday life: health care, housing, work, immigration, education, public safety, environmental protection, war and peace, and the exercise of public power. Catholic Social Teaching offers a way for us to approach these choices, a way that is much broader than party loyalty and deeper than campaign slogans.

That tradition reaches from Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, with its concern for workers, economic justice, and the responsibilities of public authority, through the social teaching of succeeding popes and the Second Vatican Council, to Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV. Across that long tradition we find a consistent conviction: political and economic life must be judged by how well it protects human dignity and serves the common good.

For voters today, one of the clearest guides is Gaudium et Spes §27. Vatican II asks us to regard every neighbor “as another self,” taking into account both the person’s life and “the means necessary to living it with dignity.” The Council then places before us a wide moral landscape: murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, trafficking, degrading working conditions, and other assaults upon human dignity.

This does not mean that every moral issue is identical. However, it does mean that the Catholic conscience cannot focus so narrowly on one concern that other serious threats to human life and dignity disappear from our view. Catholic Social Teaching helps voters see the whole moral landscape rather than reducing faithful citizenship to a single issue.

So how can Catholic Social Teaching help us evaluate the issues and information we encounter during the midterms?

It asks us to go beyond slogans. We seek reliable evidence, examine candidates’ records and proposed policies, consider likely consequences, and ask: Who is protected? Who may be harmed? Who is being forgotten? A well-formed conscience asks not simply, “What benefits my political party or me?” but, “What serves the whole community, especially the least among us?”

Pope Francis gave this responsibility a particularly compelling name: political charity. In Fratelli Tutti §180, he appealed for renewed appreciation of politics as “a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good.” He explained that love becomes civic and political when people work together to build more just social institutions. Pope Benedict XVI similarly described commitment to the common good through social and political institutions as the “political path” of charity.

Pope Leo XIV has carried that teaching forward, emphasizing that the common good is inseparable from the dignity recognized in every person and that Christians must move beyond narrow self-interest in economic and political choices.

How can we encourage ourselves and others to take the midterm elections seriously as an opportunity for faith-filled civic participation?

By remembering that faithful citizenship is more than voting. Voting matters, but citizenship begins before Election Day and continues afterward through conscience formation, respectful dialogue, advocacy, service, attention to legislation, and accountability of public officials.

Think of the common good as our shared home. A household cannot truly flourish if one person is secure while another lacks food, medicine, safety, dignity, or a voice. Likewise, a society cannot call itself just simply because many people are doing well.

The midterm elections therefore invite a deeper question than “Which side wins?” How can our political choices help build a society in which every neighbor—before birth and after birth, poor or prosperous, citizen or migrant, powerful or marginalized—is truly regarded, in the words of Vatican II, as “another self”?

Key sources: Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum; Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes §§27, 75; Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate §7; Francis, Fratelli Tutti §180; Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas.