Bishop Paprocki Doubles-Down In His Public Correction of Cardinal Cupich

Bishop Paprocki published an article yesterday in First Things entitled “Sen. Durbin Is Unfit to Receive Any Catholic Honor.“

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).

Continue reading at First Things

TAKE ACTION: Contact Cardinal Cupich and let him know what you think.