The Field of Charity at Its Most Vast: What the Church Asks of Brazil’s Voters on the Feast of St. Francis

Brazilians are voting today in a presidential race that has run for months on two accusations: that one man is a danger to the country’s sovereignty and the other a danger to its safety and its honesty. Nearly 159 million people are eligible to choose between them, most of them required by law to vote, and polls say the margin is thin. It is also the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, and six years ago Pope Francis signed an encyclical at the saint’s tomb about exactly this kind of division. The Church leaves the choice of candidate to Brazil’s voters. What it asks of them is harder: how to choose, and how to treat one another on Monday morning.

The News Story

Brazilians vote today in the first round of a general election that pits President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, whom Lula defeated in 2022. Polls are open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Brasília time. Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court says 158.7 million people are eligible to vote, and voting is mandatory; anyone who skips it without justification faces a small fine. Ballots are cast on electronic machines, and results usually arrive within hours of the polls closing.¹

Twelve candidates are on the presidential ballot, but only Lula and Bolsonaro are considered to have a realistic chance. A candidate needs more than 50 percent of valid votes to win outright. If nobody clears that bar, the top two meet in a runoff on October 25. Voters are also choosing governors, all 513 members of the Chamber of Deputies, 54 of the 81 senators, and members of the state assemblies.²

Lula, 80, is the Workers’ Party candidate and is seeking a fourth nonconsecutive term in his seventh presidential run. He governed from 2003 to 2011 and returned to office in 2023, after spending more than a year in prison on corruption convictions that were later annulled. He has campaigned on welfare programs such as Bolsa Família, protection of the Amazon, and what he calls the defense of Brazilian sovereignty against pressure from Washington. His approval rating fell as low as 24 percent during this term, and the Associated Press reports that voter worry over crime and the cost of living could cost him support.³

Bolsonaro, 45, has represented Rio de Janeiro in the Senate since 2019 and is running for the right-wing Liberal Party. He has campaigned on public security, tax cuts and spending restraint, proposing El Salvador-style megaprisons, the designation of transnational gangs as terrorist organizations and lowering the age at which suspects can be tried as adults to 16. His father is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup after the 2022 election and is under house arrest for health reasons. Flávio Bolsonaro calls that trial illegitimate and has promised to pardon his father if elected. He is himself under investigation for corruption, money laundering and tax evasion after acknowledging that he took millions of dollars from jailed banker Daniel Vorcaro to finance a film about his father. The Vorcaro scandal has also reached Lula’s circle: his former finance minister, Guido Mantega, said he arranged a meeting between Vorcaro, Lula and the central bank chief, which Reuters confirmed. Lula says he told Vorcaro there would be no political interference in the bank’s case.⁴

The United States hangs over the race. Washington imposed 50 percent tariffs on Brazilian goods in 2025, citing the elder Bolsonaro’s prosecution among its reasons, and added new tariffs this year. It also designated Brazil’s largest drug-trafficking groups as foreign terrorist organizations shortly after Flávio Bolsonaro visited the White House in May. President Trump said Thursday he is following the election “very closely” but has not endorsed a candidate. Lula’s government has warned Washington against interfering.⁵

Both men held closing rallies on Saturday, Lula in São Paulo and Bolsonaro in Rio de Janeiro. September surveys from Datafolha, Quaest and AtlasIntel gave Lula a first-round lead of roughly 2 to 4 points, and runoff scenarios sit within the margin of error. Pollsters broadly expect a second round.⁶

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

A Campaign Built on Two Accusations

Al Jazeera’s election explainer summed up Brazilian politics this year as “deeply polarised but unenthusiastic,” and Andre Pagliarini, a historian at Louisiana State University who has written a book on Lula, called it “a very downbeat campaign.” Each man’s case has leaned hard on a charge against the other. Lula casts Flávio Bolsonaro as a willing partner in American efforts to undermine Brazilian sovereignty; Bolsonaro calls Lula corrupt and weak on crime.⁷ On the trail, the senator has branded the president “incompetent,” and his rallies have featured giant inflatable balloons of Donald Trump, while Lula’s T-shirts and banners read “Brazil belongs to Brazilians.”⁸ His brother Eduardo put the mood in one sentence when he spoke to Fox News in February: “The worst that can happen to the country is the re-election of Lula da Silva.”⁹

Brazil is home to about 100 million Catholics, more than any other country on earth.¹⁰ So it’s fitting that the vote falls on the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, six years and a day after Pope Francis signed an encyclical at the saint’s tomb. Fratelli Tutti has a paragraph that could have been written for this campaign. “Today, in many countries, hyperbole, extremism and polarization have become political tools,” Francis wrote. “Employing a strategy of ridicule, suspicion and relentless criticism, in a variety of ways one denies the right of others to exist or to have an opinion.” Political life then shrinks to “slick marketing techniques primarily aimed at discrediting others,” and “debate degenerates into a permanent state of disagreement and confrontation.”¹¹

That’s a diagnosis. The Church also has a cure, and it is older than any modern election.

What Thomas Said the Law Is For

St. Thomas Aquinas asked why the Law God gave to Moses included moral commands at all, and his answer sets two purposes side by side. The chief intention of the divine law, he wrote, “is to establish man in friendship with God.” And human law has its own principal intention, the one that mirrors it: friendship “between man and man.”¹²

Sit with that for a moment, because it’s a remarkable claim to make about politics. Courts, legislatures and presidencies exist, in the end, so that the people who live under them can live as friends. Laws still restrain and punish, of course. But the restraint serves something, and the something is a city whose citizens can trust one another enough to share a common life.

Measured against that purpose, a campaign that treats half the country as the enemy is working against the very offices it wants to fill. Today Brazilians are electing a president, 27 governors, 513 deputies and 54 senators. Every one of those offices exists for the sake of the friendship Thomas described.

Political Charity

The Church gives this friendship a name. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church says it plainly: “No legislation, no system of rules or negotiation will ever succeed in persuading men and peoples to live in unity, brotherhood and peace; no line of reasoning will ever be able to surpass the appeal of love.” Love, it says, takes on “the characteristic style of social and political charity,” and it quotes Pope St. Paul VI: “Social charity makes us love the common good.”¹³

Pope Francis built a whole chapter of Fratelli Tutti on that phrase. When people join together for justice, he writes, they enter “the field of charity at its most vast, namely political charity,” and he asks for a renewed appreciation of politics as “a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good.”¹⁴ He’s specific about what it asks of leaders: they “should be the first to make the sacrifices that foster encounter and to seek convergence on at least some issues. They should be ready to listen to other points of view and to make room for everyone.”¹⁵

Political charity still lets a Christian call wrong what is wrong. What it fixes is the order of things. In the next paragraph Francis insists on “the priority of the dignity of every human being over his or her ideas, opinions, practices and even sins.”¹⁶ Even sins. That line matters in Brazil this week, because there’s real wrongdoing on the table. Flávio Bolsonaro is under investigation after admitting he took millions from a disgraced banker. Lula’s former finance minister says he helped arrange a meeting between that same banker and the president. Investigators should follow both threads wherever they lead. Charity asks Brazilians to do that honestly and to remember, at the same time, that the man under investigation is still a brother, and that his voters are neighbors who will be sitting in the same pews next Sunday.

No Party Owns the Gospel

Here the Church says something every Catholic voter needs to hear, in Brazil or anywhere else. “It is difficult for the concerns of the Christian faith to be adequately met in one sole political entity,” the Compendium teaches; “to claim that one party or political coalition responds completely to the demands of faith or of Christian life would give rise to dangerous errors.” A Catholic’s adherence to a party, it adds, “will never be ideological but always critical.”¹⁷ Then it quotes the Second Vatican Council: “no one is permitted to identify the authority of the Church exclusively with his own opinion,” and believers should “try to guide each other by sincere dialogue in a spirit of mutual charity.”¹⁸

The Council itself put the duty more concretely. Christians “must recognize the legitimacy of different opinions with regard to temporal solutions, and respect citizens, who, even as a group, defend their points of view by honest methods.” It said the same of the parties: “it is never allowable to give their interests priority over the common good.”¹⁹

Apply that honestly to Brazil, and a Catholic voter will find real goods and real worries on both sides of the ballot. Extreme poverty fell by about 40 percent between 2022 and 2024, according to a left-leaning U.S. think tank Al Jazeera cited, and voters rate Lula more highly on poverty and inequality. Violence tops the list of what Brazilians fear, named by 31 percent in a September Quaest survey, and voters rate Bolsonaro more highly on crime.²⁰ Violent crime falls hardest on poor neighborhoods, and so does the cost of living. Each candidate has heard part of the cry of the poor. The Church asks a Catholic to weigh both parts, within the limits of positions compatible with faith and morals, and to accept that a fellow Catholic who weighs them differently may be acting in good conscience.

Monday Morning

Political charity meets its hardest test after the count, when one side loses. Brazil knows this from experience. Before the 2022 vote, Jair Bolsonaro repeatedly cast unfounded doubt on the electronic voting system Brazil uses today, and he is now serving 27 years for plotting a coup after he lost.²¹ Polls suggest neither man will clear 50 percent today, which means three more weeks of campaigning before a runoff on October 25.

Fratelli Tutti describes what those weeks should build toward. Social peace, Francis writes, is “a never-ending task that demands the commitment of everyone and challenges us to work tirelessly to build the unity of the nation,” and he asks for the determination to “flee from the temptation for revenge and the satisfaction of short-term partisan interests.”²² That counsel binds the winner as much as the loser.

What I’d Watch

Watch the first hour after results tonight, and listen to how each camp speaks of the other. Watch whether the runoff campaign stays fixed on the same two accusations, or whether either man risks the “convergence on at least some issues” Francis asked of leaders. And watch October 12, the feast of Our Lady of Aparecida, Brazil’s patroness, which falls right between the two rounds.

Then pray. Pray for President Lula and for Senator Bolsonaro by name, and for the poll workers who will count 159 million choices tonight. Pray for Brazil’s bishops, who must shepherd Catholics voting on both sides. And on the feast of the saint who rebuilt a ruined church stone by stone, pray that Brazil’s Catholics carry his peace into the voting booth and out again.

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This story turns on political charity: the love that seeks the common good, binds citizens into friendship across their disagreements, and outlasts any single election.

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Notes

1. ↑ Eléonore Hughes and Anna-Catherine Brigida, “Brazilians will vote in a highly polarized presidential race on Sunday. Here’s what to know,” Associated Press via AOL, October 3, 2026, aol.com; André Richter, “Brazil has 158.7 million eligible voters for the October election,” Agência Brasil, July 20, 2026, agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br; Brian Osgood, “What to know about Brazil’s 2026 presidential election,” Al Jazeera, October 3, 2026, aljazeera.com.
2. ↑ Hughes and Brigida, “Brazilians will vote”; Luisa Leme, “Brazil’s 2026 Elections: Timeline and Fast Facts,” Americas Society/Council of the Americas, July 30, 2026, as-coa.org; Rebecca Falconer, “Lula v. Bolsonaro: Brazil election unfolds in Trump’s shadow,” Axios, October 2, 2026, axios.com.
3. ↑ Hughes and Brigida, “Brazilians will vote”; Osgood, “What to know.”
4. ↑ Hughes and Brigida, “Brazilians will vote”; Falconer, “Lula v. Bolsonaro”; Osgood, “What to know”; “Bolsonaro dynasty eyes comeback as Brazil’s socialist president faces challenge from jailed rival’s son,” Fox News, February 12, 2026, foxnews.com.
5. ↑ Hughes and Brigida, “Brazilians will vote”; Falconer, “Lula v. Bolsonaro”; “Brazil’s Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro wrap up campaigns on eve of tight vote,” Euronews, October 3, 2026, euronews.com.
6. ↑ Euronews, “Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro wrap up campaigns”; Osgood, “What to know”; Falconer, “Lula v. Bolsonaro.”
7. ↑ Osgood, “What to know.”
8. ↑ Euronews, “Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro wrap up campaigns.”
9. ↑ Fox News, “Bolsonaro dynasty eyes comeback.”
10. ↑ “Brazil’s Catholics hold slim majority as Evangelicals rise,” Taipei Times, June 8, 2025, taipeitimes.com.
11. ↑ Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, October 3, 2020), no. 15, vatican.va.
12. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 99, a. 2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
13. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 207, vatican.va.
14. ↑ Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, no. 180.
15. ↑ Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, no. 190.
16. ↑ Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, no. 191.
17. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 573.
18. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 574.
19. ↑ Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes (December 7, 1965), no. 75, vatican.va.
20. ↑ Osgood, “What to know.”
21. ↑ Hughes and Brigida, “Brazilians will vote.”
22. ↑ Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, no. 232.

Books Cited

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• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)