In response to all of your quotations, I would point to the conclusions of Cardinal Avery Dulles and Professors Germain Grisez & Finnis. Their orthodoxy and fidelity to the magisterium are beyond reasonable dispute and their scholarship and intellectual powers far surpass those clerics you have quoted. Both conclude that there are any number of reasons that could justify voting for a candidate that supports an intrinsically evil law/policy that threatens the lives of millions. Dulles says that a legislator could legitimately vote for a funding bill that includes funding for abortions if the legislation also included funding for worthwhile projects and efforts to remove the abortion funding provision had failed. Finnis, Grisez and Boyle conclude that it can be licit to vote for a canddiate who supports nuclear deterrence, which they judge to be intrinsically immoral because it includes the threat to massacre millions of innocent civilians.

Here is the quote from Cardinal Dulles:

To vote for an appropriations bill that includes some provisions for funding abortions would not be so gravely sinful as to warrant excommunication under Canon 1398. The vote might arguably be licit if the funding for abortion were only incidental and could not be removed from a bill that was otherwise very desirable.

http://www.ewtn.com/library/issues/zdulcom.htm

As for Finnis, Grisez and Boyle, the reference is to their book Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism, which cannot be accessed online.

… how can you justify voting for that person if at the same time he/she supports providing public funding for abortion, reversing the Mexico City Policy, restoring US funding to the UN Population Fund (shown to be complicit in coerced/forced abortions and sterilizations in developing countries), etc.?

Given that the vast majority of Dems (at least on the national stage) seem to hold these hard-core pro-abortion stances, it seems incredibly difficult to muster enough proportionate reasons to justify voting for them.

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/post/index/926/Archbishop-Chaput-and-the-2004-Election

The article discussed is for subscribers only.

I think Ms. Weddell’s discussion on this is perhaps the wisest view.

“Listen, last summer, Catholics in Colorado were in the preposterous position of having our three bishops in three different dioceses all take different stands on the voting issue.

In May of 2004, I, living in Colorado Springs, had been told by my bishop, in a public pastoral letter, that to vote for a candidate supporting any of the 5 “non-negotiables” would be to commit a mortal sin. (I should add that I have been told by local pastors that our Bishop later “nuanced” his stand verbally in large public meetings that he was holding around the diocese. But that didn’t have the public impact of his first letter and didn’t make it into the national news. Unfortunately, I was out of the country at that point and didn’t get to attend any of these events myself.)

Meanwhile, my cousin, living 25 miles south in the Diocese of Pueblo, has been urged to discern using the US Bishops’s voter’s guide and could, in theory, vote for any candidate in good conscience.

At the same time, a good friend, who lives 40 miles north just across the boundaries of the Archdiocese of Denver had been told something else again by Archbishhop Chaput. My old buddy, Mark Shea, had been told something else by his archbishop in Seattle. If I had stayed in Seattle, would I not be in a state of mortal sin for exactly the same action that would require confession in Colorado Springs?

Here’s the deal. An action can’t be an automatic mortal sin only in Colorado Springs and not in the rest of Colorado. An action can’t be an automatic mortal sin only in Colorado Springs and not in the rest of the world!

The orthodox Catholics of Australia (where I spent election day, 2004) weren’t concerned about committing a mortal sin should they vote for a candidate that supported abortion (almost all candidates in AU did at that point and every registered voter is required by law to vote so you simply can’t abstain!). How could I be held under penalty of automatic mortal sin and Clara, our AU director, not be simply because our respective ordinaries differed in their understanding of this particular issue?

And what if my bishop dies tomorrow and our next bishop has a very different take on the matter? In the election of 2004, it was automatic mortal sin in Colorado Springs but in the election of 2008, it’s not?

And you can’t champion the right of an ordinary to make unilateral prudential judgments on the application of Church teaching that are binding on the consciences of the Catholics in their dioceses only if those statements are the kind you agree with. It does cut both ways. The prudential judgment of a Utener or Weakland becomes just as binding as those of a Sheridan or Burke or Olmstead.

Bishop Wuerl, whose seriousness about the Church teaching is beyond dispute, is apparently very aware of these realities and the enormous confusion it can cause for faithful Catholics and is trying to address them. After reading the CNS article carefully, it is also obvious that he clearly regards the “informal” method of behind the scenes discussion as both more faithful to the fullness of Church teaching and more effective than creating some formal voting mechanism. As Wuerl pointed out “All the bishops, in fact, have a duty to promote and defend the unity of faith and discipline common to the whole church.”

The Church’s authoritative teaching on the intrinsic evil of many things (not simply abortion) does oblige us all but the practical application of that teaching in a specific historical situation requires prudential judgment. The prudential judgment of a bishop, even of a Pope, is just that – prudential judgment – and must be distinguished from normative Church teaching.

You’d have to be something of an expert to read a bishop’s pastoral letter and know where formal Church teaching ended and prudential judgment began unless the Bishop goes to great lengths to make it clear, and most of us didn’t have the expertise to do so!

I certainly didn’t have the background to distinguish at first – I knew something was wrong but I’m not an expert in moral theology so I couldn’t put my finger on the problem. Fortunately, I had the chance to consult two orthodox, world-class experts on the topic while in Australia – Bishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney and Dr. Tracey Rowland of the JP II Institute in Melbourne, who was a huge fan of then Cardinal Ratzinger, who, I am told is also a huge fan of hers. It was they (along with my old partner in crime, Michael Sweeney, OP) who clarified the issues for me.

They made a few things very clear:
1) Both Fisher and Rowland emphasized that Church teaching is “very underdeveloped” in this area. Bishop Fisher had attended a top level symposium in Rome on Evangelicum Vitae 73 in February of 2004.

Bishop Fisher said that at this symposium two top notch, orthodox theologians presented completely opposite views and neither could be considered “wrong” in light of current Church teaching (although Fisher privately agreed with one over the other). The bishop noted that only about 9 scholarly works exist on the subject of voting as a cooperation in evil and that he has read them all. There is, as yet, no authoritative interpretation of Evangelicum Vitae 73 to guide us.

2) The prudential judgments of a few bishops is not the development of doctrine (and therefore universally obliging) although some Catholics in the US began to talk as though it was.”

Speaking as one who was banned from the Commonweal blog for refusing to toe the party line, I would say that there is a direct relationship between the magazine and the leftist Catholics who regularly sing its praises on the blog. Of course, I could be wrong because I will not spend good money to read leftist nonsense with a Catholic spin. Why do that when I can get it for free on blogs (including your posts on this blog)?