After Mass on Sunday, our priest took a moment to relay a message from our bishop regarding the upcoming off-year elections here in Virginia. The Church, of course, goes to great lengths to avoid endorsing specific candidates or a particular political party, instead inviting Catholics to search their consciences. But in this particular case, the search was directed toward the plan by the Democrats — already far advanced — to amend the state constitution to enshrine abortion as an absolute right. Anyone with even a modicum of political awareness understands that, if the Democrats retain their control of the state’s House of Delegates, this amendment will become law. (RELATED: Yes, Virginia, Jay Jones Is Evil)

It shouldn’t take much, then, for my fellow Catholics to draw the correct conclusion. Abortion is a mortal sin, a particularly heinous form of murder since it targets the most vulnerable of all human life. While we are enjoined to offer our love to mothers who sincerely seek forgiveness having committed this terrible act, we are responsible before God to do everything within our power to prevent abortions from taking place — and this, of course, means condemning those politicians who promote abortion, particularly unrestricted abortion, and it certainly means voting against candidates who would make such unrestricted abortion an absolute right. (RELATED: Illinois Law Mandates On-Campus Abortion Services)

Or does it? The bishop seems to think so, and so too our local priests. Last week, however, found this belief challenged from the unlikeliest of sources, namely Pope Leo XIV himself. Did the pope suddenly announce himself a supporter of Planned Parenthood? Not exactly, nor did he suggest that abortion had somehow ceased to be a mortal sin in Catholic teaching. But for many of us, his words in a public interview completely muddied the waters, and certainly gave aid and comfort to those who would insist that politicians — even Catholic politicians — be given a break when it comes to support for abortion. (RELATED: Pope Leo Defines Himself: A Man of Faith, a Listener, a Decider — and an American)

Context matters, and the context reveals a deep dissonance within the Catholic community. Recently, Cardinal Blasé Cupich, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Chicago, announced that the archdiocese intended to confer a “Lifetime Achievement Award” on Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, a long-serving Democrat senator and, despite his professed Catholicism, a long-term proponent of abortion. Cupich’s award announcement specifically commended Durbin for his work on immigration issues, work apparently justifying this singular humanitarian honor. (RELATED: Chicago’s Cardinal Doubles Down on Honoring Pro-Abortion Politician)

Almost immediately, other Catholic bishops cried foul, including the bishop of Springfield, where Durbin makes his official home — and where for decades he’s been refused communion because of his blatant support for abortion. As outrage mounted, Durbin eventually decided to withdraw from consideration for the award, evidently out of a desire to spare his old friend Cardinal Cupich from further embarrassment.

At this point, one might have hoped that the immediate issue had been laid to rest, even as one might also regret the fact that, as in the case of other prominent Catholic politicians such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, Durbin would again get a pass (while banned from communion in the diocese of Springfield, he has, apparently, “communion-shopped” successfully for many years in Chicago and other dioceses). Then, outside an event in Rome, the new Chicago-born pontiff was invited to comment on this uproar. Unfortunately, after trying to evade the question, he then proceeded to dig a hole for himself — and then dig deeper still.

Cardinal Cupich’s original rationale for the Durbin award had been to recognize the positions Durbin has taken on immigration over the years, essentially the typical Democrat endorsement of open borders and, more recently, vocal condemnation of the Trump Administration’s efforts to reintroduce sanity to the subject of open borders and uncontrolled illegal immigration.

For those of us who were horrified by the tsunami of illegal immigrants under Joe Biden, Durbin is more nearly deserving of being singled out as the worst kind of politician, someone who, in effect, supports human trafficking, economic exploitation, and sexual slavery, the inevitable corollaries of massive waves of illegal immigration. (RELATED: The Human Ledger: How Cartels Reduce Migrant Women to Line Items of Profit)

There’s nothing humanitarian about the position Durbin has consistently taken, but “liberals” in the Catholic church, notoriously men like Cardinal Cupich, would have it otherwise. When pressed about justifying a humanitarian award for Durbin, in spite of his fanatical support for abortion, Cupich insisted that Durbin’s position on immigration counterbalanced his position on abortion. In this, he cited the concept of “balance,” of viewing the totality of a person’s positions, rather than allowing one position to dominate.

Even as the controversy was apparently being laid to rest, Pope Leo spoke up and essentially endorsed Cardinal Cupich’s call for “balance.” Then he doubled down in a thinly-veiled criticism of Trump’s immigration enforcement policies, and by extension, immigration enforcement policies across the Western world — one suspects that, sitting in Rome, surrounded by “progressive Italians” in the ranks of the Curia, bombarded on a daily basis by the left-wing biases of the Italian media, Pope Leo might also have had Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in mind. (RELATED: Italy, Giorgia Meloni, and the Future of the West)

There is literally no way one can view the pope’s comments, in the context of the current debate, as anything other than placing the influence of the Vatican firmly on the side of “open borders” fanaticism.

Unsurprisingly, MSNBC and other radical left outlets were delighted at Leo’s words. We’ve seen this building for a long time, Christ’s admonition to love one another, and parables such as the “Good Samaritan” being hijacked by the cultural Marxists. It’s bad enough that Cardinal Cupich and a host of other senior clerics here and in Europe have lent their authority to this nonsense. But when the pope does so, well, it escalates the destructive effect to hitherto unimaginable heights.

In the larger global scheme of things, this messaging undermines every effort to defend Western civilization against both secularist and Islamist threats. In Europe, “open borders” now means that radical Islam now threatens to dominate what were once Christian countries, introducing the most vile hatreds. Ironically, in the same week when the Durbin controversy played out, a Muslim terrorist attacked a synagogue in Manchester, England, killing two, injuring dozens, all to the applause of large swaths of the “anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Western” legions, the denizens of the “Omnicause.” (RELATED: EU Report Ignores Muslim Violence to Label Catholics ‘Religious Extremists’)

I would like to think that Pope Leo didn’t really mean to align himself with the likes of Antifa, and I would hope that he would be more cautious in his future utterances, particularly at a time when Christians are under assault across the globe. I would like to think that somewhere, deep down, he didn’t mean to suggest that a “progressive” position on immigration somehow whitewashes support for unfettered abortion. (RELATED: Catholics Are Being Killed, and US Bishops Form Another Anti-Racism Committee)

But in the most narrow sense, what I bemoan most of all is the aid and comfort his words provide to those nominal “Catholics” in Virginia who are looking for an excuse to vote Democrat even if it means enactment of a constitutional right to abortion. Being challenged to believe two diametrically opposed things at the same time creates cognitive dissonance, and in that space, all manner of bad thinking arises.

So there we all sat at Mass Sunday morning, being thoughtfully reminded that the stakes for Virginia’s Catholics in the coming election are huge. I would like to think that the message for Catholics is clear: that those who wish to impose abortion on our communities are in the wrong, that we stand for life, as the weekly prayer reminds us, “from conception to natural death.” That while issues such as immigration are “prudential,” things about which reasonable Catholics might agree to disagree, promoting abortion is a grievous sin, one that cannot be balanced by support for open borders or climate change authoritarianism, or any of the other “hate has no home here” leftist fantasies.

It would have helped if our new American pope, someone whose native language is English, had said this very thing in unmistakable words. Sadly, he did almost the very opposite. All Catholics are the poorer for it.

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James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. He’s just published his new novel, The Zebras from Minsk, the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk find the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian-backed terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.