When you write a column a couple weeks in advance, you have to accept that your piece might not be able to incorporate the latest news from the day that it’s published. In the case of this column, I’m writing in late October, so I don’t even know who won the Nov. 3 presidential election. Maybe it was that one guy. Maybe it was the other guy. Maybe they’re still counting ballots.

Even though I don’t know the outcome, I’m confident that, no matter who ends up in the Oval Office, the following statement is true: In a certain sense, the election results don’t change anything for a faithful Catholic.

I don’t mean to say that elections don’t matter. And I don’t mean to say that who our president is — and the policies and vision he’ll implement — isn’t of great significance. Lives are at stake, from the unborn to the immigrant, the child struggling with transgender ideology to the poor person struggling to access health care. Different possible presidents bring different possible agendas — and different possible challenges to the common good and the integrity of human life that a Catholic must confront and stand against.

But what doesn’t change is something more fundamental than a president’s agenda or the issues at hand. It’s the Christian’s obligation to engage in the public square faithfully and fearlessly, doing his or her part to shape our shared life together in a way that more consistently reflects the truth of our God-given human dignity. As Pope Francis has said previously — and reiterated in his newest encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti” — political participation is a “lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good.”

Charity. A desire for the good of the other and the good of all. This must be the beating heart of a Catholic’s civic engagement, characterizing everything we do in the realm of politics, from every Facebook post we share to every vote we cast.

My concern, though, is that in this past decade or so of increased and hyper partisanship, we’ve forgotten that charity, more so than even any particular issue, is the heart of Catholic social life. Instead, I worry that too many Catholics have become something like shills for a particular party or politician, failing to consistently advocate for life and human dignity by transcending the false dichotomy of our political landscape.

This isn’t to say that we can’t support a candidate, even a deeply flawed candidate, if we prudentially discern that his or her election will be relatively better for the common good when compared to the other options. But being complacent and silent in the face of our candidate’s violations of human dignity sacrifices our distinctive witness to a coherent Gospel of Life.

What might it look like to reclaim that witness? Well, in a sense, an election gives us a fresh start. And I suggest we begin by being willing to hold our own preferred candidates accountable when their policies deviate from respecting the dignity of their fellow citizens.

If President Trump won re-election and you voted for him, I’d argue that you have a unique duty to stand up for immigrants who have been demonized by the president for political points, or to call him out for dangerous rhetoric that undermines our political institutions and civic unity. And if you’ve helped make Biden the next resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., I’d say something similar about your doubled responsibility to adamantly oppose him when it comes to his extremist views on abortion, or his willingness to legally enshrine dangerous ideologies of sex and gender that prey upon young children.

This same kind of exercise can likely be applied to every single candidate who won election because — newsflash — very rarely do our politicians today perfectly sing from the Catholic social teaching songbook.

And that’s the point: Catholic political engagement is not primarily about a party, or a candidate, or a set of issues, even as it’s true that some issues, like abortion, are more preeminent than others. Catholic political engagement is about charity. Charity for those neighbors near and far, young and old, rich and poor, born and unborn. And no matter which party moves through the revolving door of Washington, D.C., that will never change.

Liedl lives and writes in the Twin Cities.