I was shocked to learn that the Archbishop of Chicago, Blase Cardinal Cupich, plans to bestow a lifetime achievement award on Sen. Richard Durbin through the archdiocese’s office of human dignity and solidarity at their fundraiser on November 3 at St. Ignatius College Prep. Because this decision threatens to scandalize the faithful and injure the bonds of ecclesial communion, it should be reversed.
The Church teaches that abortion—the intentional killing of an unborn human being in the womb—is “intrinsically evil,” an action that is always and everywhere “incompatible with love of God and neighbor.” We must, as Pope John Paul II said in Evangelium Vitae, “have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name.” In the case of abortion, “we are dealing with murder” since “[t]he one eliminated is a human being at the very beginning of life.” The Second Vatican Council described abortion as “an unspeakable crime.” Reflecting the inherently violent nature of the act, Pope Francis frequently compared abortion to hiring a mafia hitman “to take a human life to solve a problem.” Shortly after his election as Supreme Pontiff, Pope Leo XIV said to the Vatican Diplomatic Corps on May 16 that “no one is exempted from striving to ensure respect for the dignity of every person, especially the most frail and vulnerable, from the unborn to the elderly, from the sick to the unemployed, citizens and immigrants alike.” Unfortunately, Sen. Durbin has excluded the unborn from respecting their human dignity. The law “cannot declare to be right what would be opposed to the natural law.” Thus, efforts to create a legal right to abortion are inherently illegitimate and incompatible with justice and the common good.
Throughout his tenure, Sen. Durbin has been an outspoken proponent of legal abortion. In his nearly three decades in the U.S. Senate, Durbin has dedicated himself to creating, preserving, and expanding a legal right to abortion—that is, a legal right to kill an innocent human being in the womb. In vote after vote, Durbin has supported legislative efforts to exclude a whole class of human beings from the legal protections of the law. His views are so extreme that he even voted against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act (which bans the gruesome procedure in which a child’s skull is punctured with a pair of scissors and its brains sucked out with a vacuum) and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (which would require life-saving medical care for any child who happened to survive a failed abortion).
This obscene violence—a legal right to which Durbin sought to enshrine in American law—is contrary to human dignity and human solidarity. Thus, it is absurd that Sen. Durbin should be given an award from the office of “human dignity and solidarity” when Durbin has spent his time in office denying the human dignity of the unborn and undermining solidarity with the weakest and most vulnerable among us.
The planned honor is titled a “lifetime achievement award” and the event where Durbin is to receive it is called the “Keep Hope Alive” benefit. This is darkly ironic because the slaughter of the innocents in utero is nihilistic and always without hope, and the policies Durbin has supported have denied a lifetime to countless unborn children.
Sen. Durbin’s appalling record on the foundational issue of unborn human life renders him unfit to receive the proposed award or any Catholic honor.
The decision to grant Durbin this honor is gravely mistaken. If it takes place, it will be a source of enormous scandal among both Catholics and the public at large. People will be understandably confused as to whether the Church is sincere in its opposition to abortion, as to whether the Church really views abortion as a matter of life and death, and as to whether the Church believes human dignity is really at stake. Some Catholics may conclude that abortion is, at the end of the day, really not that important. They may conclude that some of the Church’s teaching can be safely ignored if one supports other policies that are consistent with the Church’s teachings on other matters, such as immigration.
To bestow an award on Durbin for his work on immigration, notwithstanding his brazen support for the abortion license, ignores the Church’s teaching that “[a] political commitment to a single isolated aspect of the Church’s social doctrine does not exhaust one’s responsibility towards the common good.” The Christian vocation in public life demands integrity, not the selective invocation of particular teachings. As the U.S. bishops have taught, “being ‘right’ in such matters can never excuse a wrong choice regarding direct attacks on innocent human life. Indeed, the failure to protect and defend life in its most vulnerable stages renders suspect any claims to the ‘rightness’ of positions in other matters affecting the poorest and least powerful of the human community.” Someone like Sen. Durbin, whose legislative acts have worked to undermine the protection of human life—the very foundation of civil society—is unworthy of any public honor.
Furthermore, bestowing this award on Durbin would violate both the USCCB’s guidelines and the Archdiocese of Chicago’s own policies concerning honors and awards. In the 2004 statement Catholics in Political Life, the nation’s bishops spoke with one voice, teaching that “those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles . . . should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.” Similarly, the Archdiocese of Chicago’s own policy manual provides that “Any Catholic entity subject to the authority of the Archbishop of Chicago, and any boards/fundraising committees affiliated with them shall not give awards or honors or host presentations, speaking opportunities or appearances by individuals or organizations whose public position is in opposition to the fundamental moral principles of the Catholic Church.” It is unclear why Cardinal Cupich saw fit to ignore both his brother bishops and his own diocesan policy manual.
Although Richard Durbin maintains his residence in Springfield and is therefore subject to my pastoral care and authority as the bishop of his place of domicile, Cardinal Cupich did not consult with me about this award or even notify me about his decision. I learned about it in the media. This failure to consult with a brother bishop concerning a member of his diocese is even more troubling given the fact that Cardinal Cupich knows that Sen. Durbin has not been permitted to receive Holy Communion in the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois since 2004 pursuant to Canon 915 of the Church’s Code of Canon Law for “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin” by his support for abortion. Rather than hand out awards to politicians who support the legal destruction of unborn human life, the USCCB urges people like Durbin “to consider the consequences for their own spiritual well-being, as well as the scandal they risk by leading others into serious sin.”
I offer this fraternal correction in the hope that Cardinal Cupich might reverse this erroneous decision, and so preserve the integrity of the Church’s moral teaching and avoid the scandal that this decision will otherwise cause to the faithful.
