Cardinal: Economy trumped abortion

At a midday news conference, Cardinal Francis E. George, the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said last week's election was a reflection of the importance of the economy to voters, and not a referendum on abortion.

"It's 1932 revisited,'' he said, referring to the election in which Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, defeated President Herbert Hoover, a Republican, during the Depression. "The parallel is evident. We have an incumbent Republican president, a deep recession if not a depression has begun, and once again the American voters have turned to another party to try to lift the country out of enormous economic difficulties.''

George said the bishops will revisit whether their guidance to Catholic voters, in the document Faithful Citizenship, was helpful or not. "It remains true that the public conversation in the whole country changed in October, with the economic collapse of so many institutions,'' he said. "Nonetheless, the conversation is broader than that, and we will have to come back to ask whether the way we have taught has been helpful. The document gives principles, and does not draw conclusions, because the church is not a political party. No document will say, 'you must not vote in this way, or that way'. The document is nuanced...(and) the nuances were sometimes lost when different groups took different parts of it.''