Pope Francis Walks the Line on Presidential Election

There’s no doubt American politics have been particularly partisan the past two years — and with the 2016 presidential election just weeks to go, they’re becoming increasingly more so by the day.

Even Pope Francis is being asked about the race between Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In an in-flight press conference while he flew from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Rome, Pope Francis addressed the presidential election.

“The people are sovereign. I would only say: Study the proposals well, pray, and choose with your conscience.”

John Jeremiah Sullivan from The New York Times Magazine prompted the exchange when he asked the Holy Father, “How would you counsel the faithful in America and what wisdom would you have them keep in mind next month when the election occurs?”

“You have asked me a question that describes a difficult choice because, according to you, there are difficulties with one and difficulties with the other,” said Pope Francis.

“During political campaigns, I never say a word,” the pope said, referring to the U.S. presidential election. “The people are sovereign. I would only say: Study the proposals well, pray and choose with your conscience.”

And with that, he quickly affirmed that he would not be speaking specifically on the presidential election again.

“I’ll leave the issue and I speak of a fiction,” he said, “because I don’t want to speak to this concrete issue.”

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Pope Francis then went on the discuss the question in the theoretical realm.

“When in any country there are two, three, or four candidates who don’t satisfy everyone? It means that perhaps the political life of that country has become too politicized and that it does not have much political culture,” he said.

“And, one of the jobs of the church, also in the teaching in the [university] faculties, is teaching to have political culture. There are nations, and I’m thinking of Latin America, which are too politicized. But they don’t have political culture,” Pope Francis said, specifically mentioning Latin America and not the United States when it came to the issue of being too politicized.

“People say, ‘I’m from this party,’ or ‘I’m from that party’ — but effectively, they don’t have clear thoughts about the basics, about proposals,” he concluded.

In this newsworthy press conference (yet another from the air that’s garnered attention), Pope Francis also touched on his papal visit to Georgia and Azerbaijan as well as what he described as the “global war” on marriage and the family.