Political Surrender Is Not a Catholic Virtue

Michael Matt’s latest case for staying home turns prudence into apostasy, treats imperfect voting as moral contamination, and leaves Catholics congratulating themselves while their enemies win power.

The New Piety of Withdrawal

Michael Matt has offered what may be the most polished version yet of a growing temptation on the Catholic right: political abstention dressed up as fidelity.

He says Catholics have been “frogs in this pot of boiling water for decades.” Each time we vote for the lesser of two evils, he warns, we become “just a little bit less Catholic.” Winning elections, preserving safety, and defending ourselves from hostile power are treated as lesser concerns beside the grand question of whether the Son of Man will find faith when He returns.

That is effective rhetoric. Nobody wants to be the man who sold his soul for a tax cut, a border policy, or a Supreme Court appointment. Nobody wants to stand before God and explain that he shaved away Catholic doctrine because the poll numbers were bad in Pennsylvania.

But the problem with Matt’s argument is that it does not stop at warning Catholics against corruption. It goes much further. It treats voting for an imperfect candidate as though the voter has endorsed the man’s entire life, platform, soul, instincts, handlers, and worst debate answer. It takes the normal Catholic act of prudence under ugly conditions and reimagines it as a ritual of contamination.

That is where the whole thing goes off the rails.

A ballot is not a canonization decree or an endorsement that the man receiving the vote should be invited to teach moral theology to your children.

In a secular republic, voting is an act of judgment under constraint. Sometimes bitter constraint. The Catholic voter asks which result better serves the common good, which side will do less damage, which coalition leaves more room for the Church, which administration is less likely to use the state as a weapon against Christian moral order, and which outcome gives families, schools, churches, and dissidents more space to breathe.

Matt treats that question as though asking it already proves corruption.

It proves nothing of the sort. It proves one has noticed where he lives.

“Pick Your Demon” Is a Slogan, Not Moral Theology

Matt’s most theatrical move comes when he turns elections into a demonic menu. Vote for this demon. Vote for that demon. Vote for the Freemason. Vote for the homosexual. Which demon do you want? Pick your demon. He then asks what happens when some Catholics finally get tired of “all the god damned demons.”

Once every flawed candidate becomes a demon, all distinctions vanish. The candidate who appointed the justices who overturned Roe and the candidate who wanted federal protection for abortion nationwide can be pushed into the same rhetorical basket. The coalition promising to defend religious liberty and the coalition openly committed to writing sexual revolution dogmas into law become variations on the same infernal theme. The party’s platform that is weakened, compromised, or inadequate becomes indistinguishable from the party promising to make abortion until birth the law of the land again.

Convenient.

This is how misguided moral rhetoric can become acidic. It dissolves prudence, consequence, proportion, danger, agency, and responsibility. Everything becomes a test of whether the voter can keep his hands metaphysically clean.

But Catholic moral life has never worked that way. A man may not do evil that good may come. True. Always true. But a man may tolerate defects, flaws, and lesser harms in a political actor while acting to prevent graver foreseeable damage. That distinction is not moral cowardice, but the difference between Catholic prudence and adolescent absolutism.

The “pick your demon” line also has the advantage of making the abstainer feel brave before he has actually borne any cost. The cost comes later, usually paid by someone else: parents fighting school systems, pro-lifers facing prosecution, Catholic doctors under pressure, religious institutions losing exemptions, children formed by hostile bureaucracies, families trying to survive in a country whose ruling class views Christian moral sanity as a public-health problem.

But at least someone refused to pick a demon.

Very moving.

The Abortion Pill Clip Cannot Bear the Weight Matt Puts on It

Matt’s emotional center is abortion, especially Trump’s 2024 debate answer on abortion medication. He plays the clip in which Trump says the Supreme Court “approved” the abortion pill and that he would not block it. From that line Matt builds a sweeping accusation: Trump has become, in his words, “the most proabortion president in the history of the Republican party.”

That is a very large cathedral built on one very small stone.

The abortion pill is a grave issue. No Catholic should shrug at it. Chemical abortion is not somehow morally improved because it is done through a prescription rather than a surgical instrument. The child still dies, the mother is still wounded, and the culture still learns that life can be disposed of privately, efficiently, and with the approval of institutions that call themselves health care.

But Matt’s argument needs more than a clip. It needs context, law, and proportion.

The Supreme Court did not morally “approve” the abortion pill mifepristone. In FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the Court held that the plaintiffs lacked Article III standing to challenge the FDA’s actions. That is a jurisdictional ruling. The Court did not hold that abortion pills are good, or safe, or just, or constitutionally required. It held that these particular plaintiffs had not shown the kind of legally traceable injury required to sue.

That distinction is important. Matt takes Trump’s clumsy political answer and treats it as though the entire legal and moral question ended there. It did not.

In fact, the issue has not gone away. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary later said HHS, through the FDA, was conducting its own review of evidence relating to the safety and efficacy of mifepristone, including real-world outcomes and the drug’s risk-management rules. CBS reported that Kennedy had asked Makary to review the latest data and that the FDA was looking at the drug’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy.

Maybe that review ends too weakly. Maybe it gets delayed. Maybe it leads only to modest restrictions. Maybe it becomes another bureaucratic disappointment. Welcome to politics in 2026 America.

But that is precisely the point. The actual fight over the abortion pill is being waged through agencies, rules, studies, courts, personnel, administrative law, and executive discretion. It is slow. It is ugly. It is unsatisfying. It does not feel like the Vendée.

It is also where the fight is.

Matt wants the drama of total refusal. The rest of us still have to ask who controls HHS, who controls FDA, who appoints judges, who staffs the agencies, who writes the guidance, who funds the abortion industry, who defends chemical abortion in court, and who wants to make abortion access a national civil right.

Those questions are where Catholic prudence begins.

Overturning Roe v. Wade Was Not Nothing

The strangest part of the argument is the way Dobbs, the Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade, gets pushed to the side like an inconvenient footnote.

Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, overruled Roe and Casey, and returned authority over abortion regulation to the people and their elected representatives.

That was not a small thing. It was enormous. It was the destruction of the federal constitutional abortion regime that pro-lifers had been fighting since 1973.

The Democratic Party understands this perfectly. Its own 2024 platform says Trump’s Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe, that Democrats are fighting to restore reproductive freedom in every state, and that Democrats would pass national legislation to make Roe the law of the land again.

So let us not play stupid.

The left knows what happened. Planned Parenthood knows what happened. The abortion industry knows what happened. The Democratic platform knows what happened. Millions of pro-abortion voters know what happened. But somehow, in certain corners of the Catholic right, the fact that Trump’s justices helped end Roe is treated as though it barely counts because the 2024 platform was weaker, the abortion pill answer was bad, and Trump talks like a man who learned moral theology from a casino brochure.

Yes, the platform weakened. Yes, the IVF language is indefensible from a Catholic standpoint. Yes, praising birth control is an offense against Catholic moral truth. Yes, Trump’s abortion rhetoric is often crude, evasive, and politically calculated. Say it all.

Then keep counting.

On the other side stood a coalition promising to restore Roe nationally, protect FDA-approved medication abortion, repeal Hyde, strengthen access to contraception, protect IVF, and appoint judges who would uphold what they call fundamental freedoms. That is not my caricature. That is the Democratic platform.

Matt points to the Republican retreat from stronger pro-life language in their 2024 convention platform when Democrats were winning on abortion in the polls. He says Catholics have lost their identity. But a weakened plank on one side and an open promise to rebuild the abortion empire on the other side are not morally equivalent facts.

A Catholic who cannot distinguish between those two things is not being holy. He is being obtuse.

The Platform Problem Cuts Both Ways

Matt is right about one thing: the 2024 Republican platform was weaker than it previously was. That is because the other side was going all in on reproductive rights and was winning on the issue 70 to 30 %. To stop the bleeding and gain points on the issue, the GOP used state-centered language after Dobbs, spoke of the Fourteenth Amendment without the older clarity, opposed late-term abortion, and then added support for prenatal care, birth control, and IVF.

That deserves Catholic criticism. The kind that does not wave away contraception because the consultants are nervous in Michigan.

But again, comparison matters.

The same Republican platform also promises to defend religious liberty beyond the walls of worship, create a federal task force on anti-Christian bias, cut federal funding for schools pushing radical gender ideology, keep men out of women’s sports, ban taxpayer funding for sex-change surgeries, and reverse the Biden Title IX rewrite.

The Democratic platform, by contrast, puts reproductive freedom at the center of its civil-rights agenda, defends medication abortion, promises to make Roe national law again with a Democratic Congress, supports FDA-approved abortion medication, seeks broader contraception access, and promises judges who uphold those “fundamental freedoms.”

There are two ways to handle these facts. A sane Catholic says: the Republican platform is morally defective in serious ways, but the Democratic platform is an open declaration of war against Catholic moral teaching on life, sex, family, and the natural order.

The abstentionist says: both are demons, and I am going to the catacombs.

The catacombs are apparently very comfortable now. They come with microphones, conference invitations, online fundraising, and the ability to denounce everyone else for insufficient purity while the people who hate you acquire power.

The Catholic Tradition Was Never This Delicate

The older Catholic approach to politics was far more hardheaded than the new abstentionist piety.

Leo XIII did not tell Catholics to float above public life in a cloud of immaculate disgust. He taught that the Church approves of men devoting their services to the common good and doing what they can “for the defense, preservation, and prosperity of his country.” In Sapientiae Christianae, he went further: Catholics should support men “of acknowledged worth” who serve the Catholic cause, and “in no way may it be allowed” to prefer candidates hostile to religion. That is not the language of political quietism. It is the language of duty, prudence, and defense.

Pius X was even blunter. “When the religion or the republic is in danger,” he warned, “it is not licit for anyone to be idle.” There goes the new piety of withdrawal. The pope did not say, “When the republic is in danger, retire into private purity and let the enemies of religion take the institutions.” He said idleness is not licit. He also asked whether it was not the duty of every Catholic “to make use of the political arms which he has in his hands” to defend the Church and compel politics to leave her alone. That is not martyrdom cosplay. That is Catholic realism.

Pius XI taught the same principle in Firmissimam Constantiam: “A Catholic will take care not to pass over his right to vote when the good of the Church or of the country requires it.”

Pius XII, speaking of elections involving laws touching feast days, marriage, family life, and schools, called voting “an act of grave responsibility.” He did not treat the vote as a filthy little liberal ritual that Catholics may disdain once the candidates become distasteful. He treated it as a serious instrument for defending the rights of God, souls, families, and society.

This is exactly where Matt’s rhetoric collapses. The Catholic tradition never required the faithful to wait for a spotless candidate while the enemies of religion seized power. Pius XII’s language in the postwar European elections was not precious, abstract, or self-admiring. He placed the question starkly: would nations with more than a thousand years of Christian history remain “established on the firm rock of Christianity,” or would they hand themselves over to a materialist state recognizing “no religion, and no God”? The decision, he said, lay with the electors, and the responsibility was “exalted but serious.”

In 1948 Italy, Catholics were not presented with a perfect confessional party of saints and scholastics. They were faced with the concrete danger of a communist-socialist victory, and Pius XII did not treat the election as a theater for private moral fastidiousness. He put the issue in civilizational terms: “The question is whether these two nations, these two Latin sister nations which have more than one thousand years of Christian history behind them, will continue to be established on the firm rock of Christianity… or, on the contrary, will choose to place their future in the inexorable and totalitarian power of a materialist state, which acknowledges no ideals beyond this earth, no religion, and no God.” Then came the hard political conclusion: “One or the other of these alternatives will be verified, according as the champions of Christian civilization or its enemies are returned at the head of the poll. The decision lies with the electors, and the responsibility, an exalted but serious one, is theirs.”

That was the setting in which Italian Catholics were urged to support the Christian Democrats as the practical anti-communist alternative. The Christian Democrats were not the Kingdom of St. Louis. They were a flawed political instrument in a secular state. Yet Pius XII did not tell Catholics to go home and polish their consciences while the communists took the machinery of government. He understood what the new abstentionists seem determined to forget: when hostile power is within reach of the state, imperfect resistance is not apostasy. Sometimes it is duty.

Fr. Titus Cranny states the principle with the precision that the “pick your demon” crowd badly needs. When the only real choice is among unworthy candidates, it can be licit, and even necessary, to vote for the less unworthy candidate, even one who may harm the Church in some respects, if doing so prevents the election of another candidate who would do still greater harm. That is not moral relativism, but ordinary Catholic prudence applied to political circumstances that rarely arrive wrapped in white linen.

Cardinal Amette made the same point in 1921 with admirable sanity. It would be better, he said, to vote for candidates who do not satisfy all legitimate demands but can still be expected to act usefully for the country, rather than reserve one’s votes for candidates with more perfect programs whose “almost certain defeat” would open the door to the enemies of religion and social order. That one sentence destroys half the online Catholic discourse around elections. A perfect platform that cannot win is not a strategy. In a crisis, it may become a decorative excuse for handing power to the enemy.

This is especially obvious in a secular republic. We are not living under St. Louis IX. We are not voting in the Cortes of a restored Catholic Spain. We are living in 2026 America, where Catholics must navigate liberalism, mass democracy, judicial supremacy, administrative bureaucracy, donor money, media manipulation, and moral collapse. That is the field. Refusing to play does not consecrate the field. It leaves it to the other team.

The Church has long understood that Catholics often act politically within flawed coalitions, flawed parties, and flawed systems. She has never treated prudence as betrayal merely because the available means are imperfect. The new abstentionist rhetoric sounds severe, but much of it is only delicacy wearing armor. It mistakes political squeamishness for martyrdom and calls the resulting paralysis fidelity.

The older Catholic instinct was better. Use the lawful weapons at hand. Defend the Church. Protect the family. Preserve whatever remains of Christian order. Oppose the enemies of religion. Do not pass over the vote when the good of the Church or country requires it. And for heaven’s sake, do not hand the state to your persecutors because the only available opposition failed to meet the standards of a Catholic throne that does not exist.

Martyrs Did Not Die So Catholics Could Romanticize Losing

The most irritating part of Matt’s argument is the martyrdom language.

He invokes the early Christians, the Vendée, the Cristeros, Catholics who refused revolutionary governments, the catacombs, secret worship, baptizing babies and burying the dead underground. The implication is obvious enough. Catholics who refuse to keep voting for imperfect candidates are taking their place in a long line of heroic resistance.

That is quite a promotion for staying home on Election Day.

The martyrs did not die because they refused to participate in normal prudential civic life. They died because they refused idolatry, apostasy, false worship, sacrilege, and direct commands against the law of God. The early Christians were not asked whether they preferred a flawed tax policy, an imperfect border policy, or a compromised anti-abortion platform. They were commanded to burn incense to Caesar.

Matt’s analogy blurs everything.

The Cristeros did not preserve the faith by cultivating a refined disgust for all available forms of resistance. They resisted an anti-Catholic state. The Vendéans did not become heroic because they preferred aesthetic defeat to practical action. They rose against a revolutionary regime that attacked throne, altar, and village life. These were not men turning passivity into a theory of sanctity. They fought.

And here is the part that gets skipped: if political action can lawfully restrain persecution before it arrives, Catholics are not somehow holier for refusing to use it.

There is a difference between suffering persecution because fidelity requires it and making persecution more likely because one has confused inaction with witness.

There is a difference between martyrdom and political suicide.

A man dragged to the arena for refusing apostasy is a martyr. A man who hands the arena keys to his enemies because the only guard willing to stand with him has bad theology is something else.

The Clean Hands Problem

The abstentionist always returns to conscience. My conscience will not allow me to vote for this man. My conscience will not allow me to support this compromised platform. My conscience will not allow me to participate.

Conscience matters. Of course it matters. But conscience is not a private theater where one performs moral elegance while ignoring foreseeable consequences.

A neglected vote can also have moral weight. Dominican moral theologian Merkelbach is cited for the principle that voters who, through grave fault, abstain from voting and thereby fail to stop an evil decision, election, or law from coming to pass, when they are bound by a specific duty to stop a foreseen harm, are cooperators in evil. Cardinal Costa of Florence made the same point with almost brutal clarity: even local elections can cause enormous damage, and whoever abstains or votes for men opposed to Christian faith and morals makes himself responsible for the damages that follow.

That is the part the clean-hands school never wants to discuss.

They imagine voting as the only morally dangerous act. Abstention becomes neutral, almost virginal. One either dirties himself by voting or preserves himself by refusing. But if abstention helps deliver power to men who will do grave harm to souls, families, children, churches, schools, and the unborn, then abstention is not morally weightless.

It is an act. Sometimes a very consequential one.

The man who refuses to pull a drowning child from the water because the rope is dirty has not preserved his purity. He has chosen the child’s death over contact with mud.

Politics is full of mud. That is not news. The question is whether Catholics are allowed to abandon the drowning because their shoes might suffer.

The State Will Not Become Gentle Because You Refuse to Vote

The fantasy beneath all of this is that withdrawal can somehow keep Catholics pure while the hostile state remains mostly theoretical.

That fantasy should have died by now.

The House Judiciary Committee reported that the FBI’s Richmond memorandum portrayed certain “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as possible domestic-terrorism concerns and proposed opportunities for source development in Catholic churches. The committee later said the FBI relied on at least one undercover employee and considered local religious organizations as possible “tripwire and source development” avenues.

A later committee report alleged that the scope of the issue was broader than initially disclosed, including internal FBI documents using “radical traditionalist Catholic” terminology over a period of years and additional coordination involving other offices.

One may parse every committee claim, qualify every phrase, and allow for bureaucratic evasions. Parse away. The larger point remains: Catholics, especially traditional Catholics, are fools if they think personnel and elections are abstractions.

Who runs the FBI matters. Who runs DOJ matters. Who runs HHS matters. Who appoints federal judges matters. Who writes Title IX guidance matters. Who decides whether religious liberty exists only inside a church building matters. Who controls the Department of Education matters. Who staffs civil-rights offices matters.

There is no spiritual prize for pretending otherwise.

Matt lives in Minnesota and notes that Tim Walz was his governor. He says, “We’re living under it.” Good. Then he knows better. Living under hostile power is not an abstraction or a chapter heading in a romantic book about resistance.

If you are living under it, and you still tell Catholics that the ballot box is merely a “suggestion box for slaves,” then you are not preparing them for martyrdom. You are helping ensure they get governed by the people most eager to make their lives harder.

The Reagan Argument Proves Too Much

Matt tells the story of his father agonizing over whether he could vote for Ronald Reagan because Reagan was divorced and remarried. He adds that Catholics once struggled with voting for Republicans who allowed rape and incest exceptions to abortion bans.

There is a truth there. Catholics once had a stronger instinct that personal life, marriage, family, and public moral order were connected. That instinct was better than the shrugging cynicism of modern conservatism.

But what follows?

Would it have been morally superior for Catholics to abstain and help deliver the country to men even more hostile to Christian order? Would a Catholic in 1980 have been bound to refuse Reagan because he was divorced, even if the alternative was a political coalition more favorable to abortion, secularism, judicial liberalism, and the sexual revolution?

Matt seems to think the old Catholic hesitation proves the case for abstention.

It does not.

It proves that Catholics should not become cheap dates for the Republican Party. It proves that Catholics should criticize divorce, contraception, IVF, abortion exceptions, and moral cowardice wherever they appear. It proves that Catholic voters should be harder to manipulate than they usually are.

It does not prove that Catholics may abandon prudence when the alternative coalition is worse.

The Reagan example, pushed to its logical conclusion, becomes absurd. One could always find a defect. Divorce. Contraception. Bad foreign policy. Bad economics. Masonic associations. Protestant theology. Liberal judges. Insufficient pro-life language. Failure to criminalize pornography. Failure to confess the Social Kingship of Christ.

And in modern America, one would always find something.

That is why the Catholic tradition asked the harder question: what does the common good require here, now, with these choices, under these conditions, against these threats?

Matt prefers the cleaner question: can I vote for this man without feeling compromised?

That is easier. It is also narrower, softer, and far more self-regarding.

We Are Not in a Catholic Confessional State

This point should not require explanation, yet here we are.

We are not choosing between rival Catholic princes. We are not choosing between an integralist party, a Thomist monarchy, and a mildly defective Christian Democrat coalition. We are living in a secular, post-Christian, aggressively disordered republic in which the institutional left controls enormous portions of education, media, bureaucracy, philanthropy, law, medicine, entertainment, academia, and professional culture.

In that world, politics is not a purity exam. It is perimeter defense.

A Catholic voter may dislike Trump’s rhetoric. He may loathe the IVF talk. He may want stronger abortion policy. He may be disgusted by the consultants who stripped older pro-life language from the platform. Good. He should be.

Then he must ask what happens if the other coalition takes power.

Not in the abstract. Not in a faculty lounge. Not in a Catholic Identity Conference panel where everyone gets to sound brave about the catacombs and then drive home.

What happens to your children’s schools? What happens to conscience protections? What happens to pro-life defendants? What happens to religious liberty? What happens to federal judges? What happens to gender ideology in education? What happens to Catholic hospitals? What happens to Catholic adoption agencies? What happens to parents who object? What happens when traditional Catholics are treated as extremists by a bureaucracy trained to view them through SPLC categories and regime-media suspicion?

These are not imaginary questions.

They are the questions Catholic fathers and mothers have to answer before they decide to sit out elections because a commentator persuaded them that voting for an imperfect candidate is worse than allowing their enemies to govern them.

The Final Absurdity

Matt says he cannot tell people what to do. Then he spends the video surrounding the act of voting with imagery of demons, apostasy, abortion compromise, Caesar, slavery, and martyrdom.

That is a familiar genre. “I’m not telling you what to do, but here is why your vote may be a spiritual surrender and my refusal resembles the martyrs.”

Subtle.

The trouble is that this rhetoric will not remain safely on YouTube. It will travel. It will become a reason for Catholics to stay home in the midterms. It will become one more excuse for politically demoralized Christians to withdraw while the people who hate them organize precinct by precinct, office by office, agency by agency, school board by school board.

And then, when the damage comes, the abstainers will call it persecution.

Sometimes it will be. Sometimes Catholics will suffer for fidelity no matter what they did. That is part of Christian life.

But if you had a lawful means to restrain the persecutor and refused to use it because the available ally had dirty hands, do not pretend the whole resulting disaster came wrapped in martyr’s palm.

Some of it came from negligence.

The Point

Politics will not save the Church. No sane Catholic believes that.

Bad politics can still make it harder to raise children, harder to educate them, harder to speak the truth, harder to defend life, harder to protect religious institutions, harder to resist the sexual revolution, harder to preserve what remains of Christian order, and harder to live without state pressure bearing down on every point of Catholic resistance.

That is enough.

The Catholic response to a hostile political order is not theatrical withdrawal. It is prayer, penance, formation, family life, parish life, homeschooling where necessary, local organization, legal defense, cultural work, mutual aid, and yes, voting. Not because the ballot box is an altar, Trump is a saint, or because the Republican Party is trustworthy. Not because compromise is pleasant.

Because lawful defense is lawful, prudence is a virtue, and clean hands are not much use when they are folded neatly in your lap while your enemies take the city.

Michael Matt is right to fear Catholic compromise. He is right to condemn abortion. He is right to despise the moral collapse of the Republican establishment. He is right that contraception, IVF, divorce, and abortion exceptions are not small matters.

But when he turns those truths into a counsel of political surrender, he leaves Catholic realism behind.

There is a difference between martyrdom and political suicide.

There is a difference between refusing to worship Caesar and refusing to stop Caesar’s agents from burning your house down.

There is a difference between keeping the faith and confusing helplessness with holiness.

The Church is in crisis. The country is in crisis. That is no excuse to surrender.

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