Abstract
This article offers a comparative analysis of two 2015 Catholic bishops’ statements on politics: the Ugandan Episcopal Conference’s “Free and Fair Elections” and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “Faithful Citizenship.” Both statements were released in the run-up to presidential elections in Uganda and the United States in 2016. Overall, the U.S. bishops offer a detailed, policy-oriented, magisterially-guided statement that aims to form the political consciences of American Catholic voters. In contrast, the Ugandan bishops provide a broader, process-oriented statement that reflects their self-styled image as “prophets to the nation.” Not surprisingly, both national episcopal conferences uncritically embrace the political imagination of the nation-state, limiting both hierarchies’ ability to conceive of Catholic identity in more genuinely catholic, transnational terms.|Keywords: church and state, U.S. bishops, Uganda, politics, 2016 elections