The Pope’s intervention in the US election could be bad news for Catholics – and democracy

Where does politics end and religion begin? Pope Francis has stoked that debate once again with his recent intervention in the US presidential campaign, where he commented on the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

Voters, he told journalists on his plane back to Rome from a tour of Asia, will have to choose between the “lesser” of two evils: that of Donald Trump’s anti-migrant policies, and Kamala Harris’s support for women’s abortion rights.

This may seem puzzling to some, who view being anti-migrant and supportive of abortion as at opposite ends of the political spectrum. But from the Pope’s point of view, they are part of a continuum of being “pro-life” – thinking that has seen Francis also speak out passionately against the death penalty and the Catholic Church being opposed to assisted dying.

Life, according to its theology, is a gift from God, and so must be cherished. That includes helping migrants, not leaving them to their fate in the Mediterranean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico. It also means that nobody has a God-given right to take it away – hence opposition to abortion, the death penalty and assisted dying.

Pope Francis’s view of the sacredness of life, and the need to take an ethical stance, has also led him to intervene many times in speaking about the need to counter climate change, because it not only threatens God’s creation – planet Earth – but also harms the poorest and most vulnerable people across the globe.

He is not the first pope to speak out, either. Papal political interventions have a strong track record, including John Paul II’s regular denunciations of communism as a threat to humanity’s freedom. Pius XI, too, issued an encyclical – or teaching document – in 1937, denouncing the racial