Dear friends,
As you know, the Church is not in the business of naming candidates that you should vote for. (Of course, some priests don’t seem to have gotten the memo, even when their bishop or archbishop has been perfectly clear with them about it. In their idiotic pride, such priests think that they understand politics so well that they are entitled to foist the product of their mental gymnastics on the laity, rewriting Church teaching and cheapening their priesthood into just another type of “influencer” who wants to “make a difference” and shape the government, the Church, and the world in their own small image.)

Instead, clergy are (or should be) in the business of forming the consciences of the faithful, so that they can apply the principles of their faith to the candidates who are running for office, using their well-formed consciences. Forming civil society is, after all, the realm and responsibility of the laity. But priests are not the only place you can turn to do the work of forming your conscience. Every Christian has the responsibility to seek out what Christ teaches us through His Church, and then to apply it in the actions we take in fulfilling our responsibility to civil society, which includes voting.

But when we’re looking to form our consciences according to Christ’s teachings, it can be hard to find literature that is authentically Catholic and not written with the intent to persuade you to embrace one political camp or another. That’s why I would like to recommend the newly-published book from Ascension Press, Clear Conscience: A Catholic Guide to Voting. According to their website’s description, “This book will not tell you who to vote for. That is a decision only you can make. Instead, it will give you the guidance you need to vote with a clear conscience. This book was a collaborative effort of several authors and Ascension editorial staff, and is intentionally non-partisan.” This book is awesome because it spends EIGHT CHAPTERS just talking about principles, without even getting into specific issues! (Then it covers issues in the following eight or nine chapters.) You can view the table of contents and purchase the book on the Ascension Press website. https://ascensionpress.com/collections/clear-conscience-a-catholic-guide-to-voting
This is what we need. Every political party is imperfect, because every party creates a platform based on the positions that the leaders of that party think are important (or will attract voters), and humans are fallible. We need to be able to form our consciences without thinking in terms of political parties, so that afterwards we can apply what we have learned to the platforms of individual candidates running for election, and to the various laws and amendments up for a vote.

Another good source of information for working through the general moral principles involved in voting is at EWTN.com/vote, where you can wrestle with the questions of forming your conscience with Church teaching, and how to do good and avoid evil. A moral theologian once told me: We can never choose a “lesser of two evils.” We do not choose evil that good might come from it. That’s called consequentialism, and it’s immoral. https://www.ewtn.com/vote/
Of course, in terms of what the Church teaches about certain areas of moral theology that often arise, you can also read the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ document Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship for free on their website, USCCB.org, or you can buy a copy. It is much less comprehensive but might still be helpful.  https://www.usccb.org/resources/forming-consciences-faithful-citizenship-pdf