text: Thank you very much for this editorial. It's critical to start holding the US hierarchy accountable for its thinly-veiled political advocacy.
  
  The Church has every right to exhort against abortion, but legally it does not have the right to endorse candidates. As difficult as it may be in an authoritarian, monarchical institution like the Catholic Church, Catholics who respect the separation of church and state must speak out.
  
  NCR writes:
  
  "We suspect many sectors of the society will be performing election postmortems to figure out how our politics have reached this point of extreme division."
  
  It's not a mystery. It's the inevitable outcome of American political culture since the Civil Rights Movement. Trump did not come out of nowhere. He is the face of the underbelly of movement conservatism. The Republican intelligentsia recoils, but they are utterly complicit.