A number of American bishops have criticized the decision of Chicago’s Cardinal Archbishop Cupich for preparing a public award for Senator Dick Durbin for his treatment of immigrants. They argue that the church should not bestow such honors on a man who has ferociously opposed the right to life and has promoted legal abortion throughout his career.

That open criticism itself was taken as a sign of how things have changed from Pope Francis to Pope Leo. Cupich was known to be a sounding board for Pope Francis when it came to the American church.

Well, Pope Leo has intervened, and conservatives and traditionalists are going to wince. From a report in America.

“I understand the difficulty and the tensions, but I think, as I myself have spoken in the past, it’s important to look at many issues that are related to what is the teaching of the church,” the Pontiff said.

“Someone who says I am against abortion but says I am in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life,” the pope said. “Someone who says I am against abortion, but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

“They are very complex issues,” Pope Leo said, and “I don’t know if anyone has all the truth on them.”

These comments are highly evocative of a concept promoted by progressive Catholics called the “seamless garment,” which sought to gather together all the church’s social and political stances as equally important.

The whole comment contains the weird slur that any substantial political voice within the church is advocating for “the inhuman treatment of immigrants,” which is an entirely different thing from a policy of immigration control, which can be executed humanely or inhumanely. And the equivalence between abortion and the death penalty can only be in that the church currently says both are impermissible. But clearly they are different things. The church has traditionally endorsed the death penalty for grave criminals, even preaching on its medicinal effect upon souls. Unborn children are guilty of nothing, and comparing the fate of aborted children to hardened criminals is morally obtuse.

The worst message the seamless garment approach can communicate goes something like: If abortion is just as bad as shoving an illegal immigrant, then maybe abortion is not so bad.