Rome Newsroom, Sep 30, 2025 / 15:36 pm (CNA).
Pope Leo XIV responded to controversy over the Chicago cardinal’s plans to honor a Catholic U.S. senator who supports legalized abortion, saying that the senator’s record should be considered in its totality and that Americans should search together for the truth on ethical issues.
Several U.S. bishops condemned Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich’s plans to honor U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, with a “lifetime achievement award” for his work surrounding immigration policy despite his pro-abortion voting record.
“I am not terribly familiar with the particular case. I think it’s important to look at the overall work that a senator has done during, if I’m not mistaken, in 40 years of service in the United States Senate,” the pope told reporters on Tuesday in response to a question from EWTN News.
He said: “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 the teachings of the Church.”
“Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life,” the pope explained. “Someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro life.”
“So they are very complex issues and I don’t know if anyone has all the truth on them,” he continued, “but I would ask first and foremost that they would have respect for one another and that we search together both as human beings and in that case as American citizens and citizens of the state of Illinois, as well as Catholics, to say that we need to be close to all of these ethical issues. And to find the way forward as a Church. The Church teaching on each one of those issues is very clear.”
The number of U.S. bishops who have condemned Cupich’s decision to honor Durbin with a “lifetime achievement award” has risen to 10, including two bishops emeritus.
The Chicago-born Pope Leo spoke to reporters as he was leaving the papal villa of Castel Gandolfo near Rome, where in recent weeks he has made it a practice to spend Tuesdays before returning to the Vatican.
Seven current bishops have joined Springfield, Illinois, Bishop Thomas Paprocki in calling on Cupich to reconsider honoring Durbin including Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco; Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska; Bishop James Wall of Gallup, New Mexico; Bishop David Ricken of Green Bay, Wisconsin; Bishop Carl Kemme of Wichita, Kansas; Bishop James Johnston of St. Joseph-Kansas City, Missouri; and Bishop Michael Olson of Fort Worth, Texas.
The recently retired Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, also addressed the controversy over the weekend in a statement released to the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, in which he referred to the move by Cupich as a “source of scandal.”
Cupich has defended the award as being aligned with instructions by the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2022, which instructed bishops “to reach out to and engage in dialogue with Catholic politicians within their jurisdictions.”
A spokesperson for Cupich did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Responding to Cupich’s argument, Naumann said in the statement: “Dialogue does not require giving awards to Catholic political leaders who disregard the most fundamental of human rights, the right to life of the unborn.”
Bishop Emeritus Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, has also called on Cupich to reverse his decision to proceed with the award.
In an interview on EWTN’s “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo” on Sept. 25, Paprocki called on the Chicago cardinal to either withdraw the award or Durbin himself to decline it.
A spokesperson for Durbin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cupich has since canceled meetings with two groups of Illinois Catholic leaders, the Catholic Conference of Illinois and a separate meeting of Illinois bishops, this past week.
So far, the Illinois bishops of Peoria, Rockford, and Joliet have refrained from joining Paprocki in calling for Cupich to reverse his decision, while the Diocese of Belleville is currently awaiting the appointment of a new bishop, after its former Bishop Michael McGovern was appointed archbishop of Omaha.
This story was updated on Sept. 30, 2025, at 4:23 p.m. ET with the various bishops’ comments.
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See Philip Lawler, Catholic Culture, Sept. 30.
I have to put this “capital punishment is not pro-life”, down to -once again- the “Peru experience”. Catholic pro-aborts use it too – in order to “add weight and gravamen” to themselves. It’s a long-worn argument of less than 35 years, which means it is not today an especially new idea to say “capital punishment is not pro-life”.
In my recollection this goes back to the Nineties and from what I know not too far beyond that. In the early eighties there was just an anti-capital punishment movement standing on its own debating its issues on their own terms and feelings, viz., retribution, prevention, statistics, recidivism, prisoner reform, burden of incarceration, humanitarian appreciation, etc., etc. Alluding forgiveness to insinuate.
Pro-life from inception was about defending the life of those yet to be born, the innocent and defenseless. I believe the impulse and the initiatives got integrally generated as from the beginning, through CATHOLIC traditional-minded types mostly. It proved to be hugely successful and popular and as we can see today unstoppable.
What I think then occurred, some pundit types perceived a “meaning” in identifying the two things and professing them together as a kind of “wisdom”. What they were doing was -and remains- an attempt to harness pro-life sensibility, renown and cluster, to swing it all to their way. Yet the two things are neither alike nor on the same footing.
Clustering for these latter “life activists” is about co-opting and matching perceptions.