Jeb Bush wants you to know he won’t be taking marching orders from Pope Francis when it comes to political or economic matters. “I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope,” Bush said at a campaign stop Tuesday. "I think religion ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting in the political realm.” Bush’s comments echo similar statements made by Rick Santorum, who said in a June 7 interview that the Church should stay away from matters of science and policy and stick to “theology and morality.” As election season commences, questions about Pope Francis will likely surface repeatedly in candidate question-and-answer sessions, in no small part because the Republican primary field is stocked with Catholics: George Pataki, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio (who also doubts Francis's capacity to contribute to political matters), along with Bush and Santorum.

The categories Bush and Santorum rely on to restrict religious reasoning to convenient subjects are, of course, porous and unstable. Bush has shown no signs of attempting to exclude religion from politics per se; during the ugly, protracted 2005 struggle over the life of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman on life support in a persistent vegetative state, Bush campaigned fiercely to keep Schiavo alive. As governor of Florida, Bush was also a reliable anti-abortion advocate. The same is true of Santorum. Both have linked their pro-life politics to their faith. These politicians appear to have no principled objection to religious reasoning governing aspects of political action; the objection that church and state should scarcely mingle only arises when religion becomes inconvenient to capital, as in the case of Francis’s entire papacy.

Through various accidents of history, American democracy has split down the middle, producing two increasingly acrimonious parties with diverging interests. The trouble for Catholics is that each party claims a share of morally upright positions. Thus we tend to either prioritize or, as in the cases of Bush and Santorum, invent specious disqualifiers for the pieces of Catholic moral theology that don’t mesh with our partisan preferences.

It is this tendency more than any other that Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home challenges, through its articulation of a robust moral ecology.

In the 1980s, with the Cold War underway and fears of nuclear war spreading alongside concerns about rapid cultural change, Cardinal Joseph Bernadin, Archbishop of Chicago, helped popularize the “seamless garment” approach to Catholic public deliberation. Bernadin campaigned relentlessly against nuclear proliferation, and paid equal attention to abortion, capital punishment, and other forms of pervasive violence: His vision of a “seamless garment” advanced the idea that in order to be effective, Christian ethics must be coherent. As he remarked at a 1984 lecture, “A consistent ethic does not say everyone in the Church must do all things, but it does say that as individuals and groups pursue one issue, whether it is opposing abortion or capital punishment, the way we oppose one threat should be related to support for a systemic vision of life.” In other words, though individuals and organizations within the Church might pursue specific political goals, their ethos must be wholly synchronized around the valuation of human life. There is no room in such an approach for creation care (a Christian term for environmental action) or welfare to be ruled out of the purview of Catholic moral theology: There is one morality, and it informs all principles.