Pope Leo’s Confusing Defense of Cupich

By clouding clear moral teaching, the Holy Father risks shielding scandal and undermining the bishops who spoke out.

The storm surrounding Cardinal Blase Cupich’s plan to bestow a “Lifetime Achievement Award” upon Senator Dick Durbin has now taken an extraordinary turn. Under mounting public pressure and amid reports that senior leaders of the U.S. bishops’ conference were preparing a public intervention, Senator Durbin himself declined the award. The Chicago Archdiocese, caught in a maelstrom of criticism, was spared the spectacle of publicly honouring a politician who has spent his career as one of the nation’s most consistent supporters of abortion.

At least ten U.S. bishops had already spoken out against the proposed award. Their message was not ambiguous. To confer ecclesial recognition on a man who has spent decades undermining Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life would be to hand scandal to the faithful. It would create the impression that the Church is prepared to compromise its teaching for the sake of political expediency. Bishops such as Thomas Paprocki and Joseph Strickland spoke with admirable clarity: you cannot honour a pro-abortion legislator and simultaneously claim to defend the unborn. The theological principle here is simple and ancient: to honour someone in the name of the Church is to hold them up as an exemplar of Catholic virtue. To do so with a pro-abortion politician is incoherent and misleading.

It was in this context, with the controversy still raging, that Pope Leo XIV made his remarks. “Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favour of the death penalty is not really pro-life,” he explained. “Someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.” With due respect to the Pope, this is a very poor answer to the real question at hand.

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