When confronted with the chance to issue a moral challenge to some of the country’s most powerful politicians recently, one of the nation’s most influential Catholic figures failed.
Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Catholic archbishop of Chicago, gave the invocation at the Democrats’ national convention Aug. 19 while one of Planned Parenthood’s mobile clinics provided free abortions less than two miles from the convention site, Chicago’s United Center.
Yet Cupich said nothing.
Conservative Catholics expressed outrage. Note the highlighted sections of the following comments.
“Cardinal Cupich missed a clear opportunity last night to condemn their vile, murderous policies and, in effect, betrayed the vibrant pro-life community that he once aligned himself with in our state, said Mary Kate Zander, executive director of Illinois Right to Life.”
“(N)owhere in his invocation did Cardinal Cupich offer the slightest challenge to the perverse ideology that ruled the Democratic convention,” said Phil Lawler, editor of the website Catholic Culture.
But Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, former papal nuncio to the United States, provided the most stunning — and accurate — explanation. Cupich’s silence reflects “the blood pact between the globalist deep state and the Bergoglian deep church,” Vigano wrote on Twitter/X.
As one of Pope Francis’ ideological lackeys, Cupich vigorously supports the pope’s agenda of deemphasizing abortion in favor of environmental sustainability, unlimited immigration and economic redistribution. Francis’ positions demonstrate the Vatican’s support for the United Nations’ Agenda 2030, which reflects the Holy See’s commitment for six decades to globalist, materialist utopianism, as Front Page Magazine often reported.
Two episodes in the past five years illustrate Cupich’s role. In 2019, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops was discussing a supplement to their voting guide, Cupich tried introducing an amendment to oppose another insisting that abortion remain “our preeminent priority because it directly attacks life itself.”
Cupich wanted to include a paragraph from one of Francis’ apostolic exhortations, which warned Catholics about behaving as if “the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause that they themselves defend,” it stated. The cardinal added that Francis wants to ensure “that we do not make one issue that a political party or group puts forward (preeminent) to the point where we’re going to ignore all the rest of them,” he said.
The bishops became divided on how to phrase the proposed amendment, with Cupich insisting they include the paragraph verbatim. Eventually, the bishops voted against it.
Some bishops “noted that Cupich has a regular habit of calling for greater use of the pope’s texts in conference documents,” reported Catholic News Agency. “One bishop called this habit ‘obsequious.’ ”
Two years later, Cupich simply ignored his fellow bishops.
In the wake of Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration, the cardinal criticized the USCCB’s public opposition to Biden’s support for abortion.
“For the nation’s bishops, the continued injustice of abortion remains the ‘preeminent priority,’ ” Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, the USCCB’s president, wrote in a statement issued on Inauguration Day. “Abortion is a direct attack on life that also wounds the woman and undermines the family.”
“Rather than impose further expansions of abortion and contraception, as he has promised, I am hopeful that the new President and his administration will work with the Church and others of good will … to address the complicated cultural and economic factors that are driving abortion and discouraging families.”
Cupich called Gomez’s statement “ill-considered,” he said. “Aside from the fact that there is seemingly no precedent for doing so, the statement, critical of President Biden, came as a surprise to many bishops, who received it just hours before it was released.”
The Jesuit magazine America called the cardinal’s response “a rare public rebuke…from one of its members.”
Cupich’s behavior reflects Francis’ own priorities. Despite his rhetoric, which included equating abortion to “hiring a hitman,” the pope’s actions demonstrate his willingness to sacrifice the church’s historic opposition to his geopolitical agenda, as Front Page Magazine reported.
The worst example came in 2021. Cardinal Luis Ladaria, the Vatican’s head of doctrine at the time, basically asked American bishops to ignore canon law and allow elected officials who support abortion to receive communion. Those officials include two of Francis’ favorites: Biden and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker.
“It would be misleading,” Ladaria wrote, “to give the impression that abortion and euthanasia alone constitute the only grave matters of Catholic moral and social teaching that demand the fullest level of accountability on the part of Catholics.”
Ladaria even used the term “pro-choice” to describe abortion advocates.
In 2017, Francis honored Emma Bonino for her work with African refugees. Bonino, a left-wing activist who served in the Italian and European parliaments, performed illegal abortions in Italy and supported legalizing abortion. Yet the pope ranked her “among the greats of today’s Italy.”
Last year, the Vatican offered a tepid response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade through L’Osservatore Romano, its official newspaper.
“The protection and defense of human life is not an issue that cannot remain confined to the exercise of individual rights but instead is a matter of broad social significance,” the editorial read. “It is a question of developing political choices that promote conditions of existence in favor of life without falling into a priori ideological positions. This also means ensuring adequate sexual education, guaranteeing health care accessible to all and preparing legislative measures to protect the family and motherhood, overcoming existing inequalities … .” (Emphasis added.)
Francis’ Twitter account at the time not only failed to mention the Supreme Court’s decision. It made no mention of abortion at all.
Perhaps Francis chose not to embarrass one of his closest advisors: Columbia Economics Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who wrote the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. In his book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Sachs called abortion is “a lower-cost option” to prevent the birth of “unwanted children.”
Why would Francis make such a man an advisor? Because five decades before he became pope in 2013, the Vatican embraced globalist, materialist utopianism at the Second Vatican Council, as Front Page Magazine reported.
Three papal encyclicals — John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (1963), Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967) and Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate (2009) — reinforced each other with increasing detail. John called for “a public authority with power” to ensure “the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and, finally, the necessary social services,” he wrote. Such an organization, Paul added, ultimately would create “a new juridical order.”
Benedict took those concepts to their logical extents, as Front Page reported. He advocated creating an authority “with teeth” that would “manage the global economy … to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace, to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration,” he wrote. If the UN could not undertake such responsibilities, Benedict argued, a new organization must replace it.
Benedict’s “true world political authority,” he wrote, would use its comprehensive power “to ensure compliance from all parties,” thereby eliminating the nation-state. The agency’s ultimate goal, he added, would be to govern a “directed” global economy that would “open up the unprecedented possibility of large-scale redistribution of wealth on a world-wide scale,” he wrote.
Benedict’s goals match the UN’s Agenda 2030.
In 2015 at the United Nations, Francis called Agenda 2030 “an important sign of hope.” Four years later at a Vatican conference, the pope described the plan as “a great step forward for global dialogue, marking a vitally ‘new and universal solidarity,’ “ he said while quoting from Laudato Si, his encyclical on the environment.
So what does all this have to do with abortion?
Agenda 2030 lists “Gender Equality” as one of the goals. But the UN’s definition contradicts historic Catholic teaching on abortion and birth control. The six targets for meeting that goal include securing “universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights.” That means “adolescent girls and young women aged 15-19” should “make their own informed decisions regarding sexual relations, contraceptive use and reproductive health care.”
Not for nothing does Sachs, the author of those sustainability goals and a papal advisor, support abortion.
Not for nothing did Cupich fail to address the issue at the Democrats’ convention. With the Vatican willing to destroy its own moral credibility for the sake of a utopian globalist agenda he supports, why would he?