A Catholic journalist in the Washington Post is asking the question that may be on a few Catholic minds these days: is voting for Barack Obama a sin?

Like most Maryland Democrats, I voted for Sen. Barack Obama in the recent Potomac Primary. By doing so, according to the leaders of my church, I put my soul at risk. That’s right, says the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — tap the touch screen for a pro-abortion-rights candidate, and you’re probably punching your ticket to Hell.

For a church that “thinks in centuries,” things sure are moving quickly. Back in 2004, as Washington correspondent for the independent National Catholic Reporter, I covered what Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart dubbed the “wafer wars.” A handful of conservative bishops warned Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, a pro-abortion rights Catholic, that they would deny him Communion should he attempt to receive the church’s most sacred sacrament.

Now the bishops have raised the stakes: It’s not only lawmakers and candidates who risk damnation, 98 percent of the U.S. bishops agreed last November, but the voters who put them in office. “It is important to be clear,” the bishops said in a 44-page statement titled “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” “that the political choices faced by citizens[emphasis added] not only have an impact on general peace and prosperity but also may affect the individual’s salvation.” Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, chairman of the committee that drafted the statement, put those high-minded sentiments into plain English earlier this month. Support for a candidate who “espouses policies that are gravely immoral” is possible “only under exceptional circumstances that are hard to imagine,” he told the Cathedral Club of Brooklyn.

To Catholics like me who oppose liberal abortion laws but also think that other issues — war or peace, health care, just wages, immigration, affordable housing, torture — actually matter, the idea that abortion trumps everything, all the time, no matter what, is both bad religion and bad civics. It’s not, for God’s sake, as though we’re in Nazi Germany and supporting Hitler.

Or is it? Amazingly, at least one influential bishop has made just that comparison publicly, and it’s a good bet that many others believe it privately.

“In our country we have, for the most part, allowed the party of death and the court system it has produced to eliminate, since 1973, upwards of 40 million of our fellow citizens without allowing them to see the light of day,” wrote Rockford, Ill., Bishop Thomas Doran in 2006. “No doubt, we shall soon outstrip the Nazis in doing human beings to death.” He continued, “We know . . . that adherents of one political party would place us squarely on the road to suicide as a people.”

The author goes on to give a pointed history of the United States bishops over the last couple decades, and concludes:

So what’s a pro-life, pro-family, antiwar, pro-immigrant, pro-economic-justice Catholic like me supposed to do in November? That’s an easy one. True to my faith, I’ll vote for the candidate who offers the best hope of ending an unjust war, who promotes human dignity through universal health care and immigration reform, and whose policies strengthen families and provide alternatives to those in desperate situations. Sounds like I’ll be voting for the Democrat — and the bishops be damned.

I suspect there are a lot of people in the pews who feel that way.