The Democratic senator, a Catholic, has been a strong supporter of legal abortion.
I know what you’re thinking.
That’s the tweet of a man who should be honored by the Catholic Church!
Well, that’s what Chicago Cardinal Blaise Cupich says.
Senator Dick Durbin is being given a “lifetime achievement award” from the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Office of Human Dignity and Solidarity Immigration Ministry at their annual Keep Hope Alive fundraising dinner.
Faced with criticism — including by the bishop of Springfield, where Durbin is from (he evidently has a residence in Chicago, too) — Cupich has doubled down in support of the move. In a statement, Cupich said:
At the heart of the consistent ethic of life is the recognition that Catholic teaching on life and dignity cannot be reduced to a single issue, even an issue as important as abortion. The annual celebration of immigrants, Keep Hope Alive, will recognize all the critically important contributions Senator Durbin has taken to advance Catholic social teaching in the areas of immigration, the care of the poor, Laudato Si’, and world peace. The recognition of his defense of immigrants at this moment, when they are subjected to terror and harm, is not something to be regretted, but a reflection that the Lord stands profoundly with both immigrants who are in danger and those who work to protect them.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki, publicly correcting the cardinal, said:
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.
About Durbin and the evil of abortion, Paprocki wrote:
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.
Paprocki’s full piece in First Things is worth reading. It’s a sober and necessary reminder of the moral import of abortion and the need for people of good will to oppose it, and to oppose a culture that tolerates, even encourages, blatant barbarism like partial-birth abortion and leaving to die babies born alive from a botched abortion.
Abortion is not just one of many political issues. It is a rot at the core of the United States, an evil that wars against the most precious of human relationships: between a mother and her child. Whatever euphemism you choose to make yourself feel better about it, it’s not about planning parenthood but destroying the human family. In a culture where the family is strong, we would not say we need abortion. The love would be too great. The radical hospitality we would show for one another would be too embracing.
Durbin, the highest-ranking Catholic Democrat, is an example of someone who should know better, who should do better. Years ago, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said that he could not have foreseen that the Democrats would become the party of abortion on demand, because there were too many Catholics in the party. But it’s Democrats like Durbin who have presided over a party that works to defeat the rare pro-life Democrats like former Illinois Congressman Dan Lipinski, a Catholic. He was primaried out of office for being a pro-life Democrat.
I happen to be writing from Chicago, where I will be emceeing a fundraiser tonight for Aid for Women, which is a solution to the culture of death here. I’ve been to some of their sites over the years — including maternity homes — where women get the support they need to receive and cherish new life. All too often, women don’t know how precious their lives are, how loved they are by our Creator and by others who want to help them flourish as a woman and as a mother.
Tonight, Aid for Women will be giving their big award to Robert Gilligan, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Illinois. As I remember it, Robert is the one who introduced me to Aid for Women years ago, inviting me out to speak at a breakfast fundraiser and at the Chicago March for Life.
In an interview on his faith and his work, Gilligan said:
The lack of respect for human life at all stages has led to a cheapening of the value of human life. We see videos of body parts of aborted babies being sold for research. We see the body of a dead Syrian refugee child washed up onshore. We see photos of ISIS jihadis holding a sword above the head of a kneeling, hooded Christian. And we see people lobbying their lawmakers for the right to get a lethal prescription from their doctor so that they may end the most precious gift that God has given them — their life.
By the way, you have got to love this aside about Durbin in the Chicago Tribune:
But it’s the five-term senator’s support for abortion rights — while he personally disapproves of abortion — that elicited objections from Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Durbin’s hometown, who said he was “shocked” by the idea of honoring the U.S. Senate’s No. 2 Democrat.
Your personal disapproval of abortion doesn’t mean much if you can’t do anything publicly to oppose it when you have the platform. At least Mario Cuomo tried harder to try to justify the unjustifiable. Abortion either is or is not murder. It either is or is not evil. Pregnancy complications should not be used to make a moral muddle and confuse and scare women. Certain lies have been thriving in the post-Roe media atmosphere: Pregnant and have sepsis? The pro-lifers want you dead! (It’s not true. That something so obvious must be stated is a menace.)
The institutional church in Chicago may be honoring Dick Durbin. But elsewhere in the pro-life movement, which is filled with Catholics, other Christians and people of faith, and men and women of goodwill, someone who courageously fights for the unborn is being honored. Robert Gilligan fights the idea that abortion is a matter of basic women’s health care, and he does it, with love and joy, in one of the most hostile environments.
If there is an upside to the Archdiocese of Chicago’s grave mistake in celebrating Durbin’s public policy record, it is in shining a light on what the Gospel calls for when there is a pregnancy. As I write, five bishops have spoken out against Cupich.
When I rolled into town last night, on the phone with someone talking about a precious human life battling a harrowing diagnosis, I saw a surprise: a large banner with Pope Leo’s face on the highway into downtown from O’Hare. It’s something most of us said could never happen — a pope from the United States, and a Chicago boy! The Polish mecca of St. Stanislaus parish displays the banner on a building facing the incoming traffic. You could say that now more than ever it is especially shameful for Chicago to bear such false witness — feeding the lie that it is perfectly fine for a Catholic to be actively at work to end the most innocent and vulnerable of human lives. All eyes could be on the Catholic Church in Chicago to show us how it’s done, instead of what not to do.
Aid for Women, under its executive director Sue Barrett, Robert Gilligan, and Dan Lipinski, and my friend Mary Fiorito (a good friend of the late Cardinal George) — they and others like them will carry on. Thanks be to God. Cardinal Cupich and the Archdiocese may not honor them with lifetime achievement awards, but they honor God with their work to protect the voiceless unborn and their mothers, who deserve so much better than pressure to abort.