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Pro-life activists will publicly protest the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Rerum Novarum Banquet based on objections to an award recipient who has donated more than $1 million to organizations that promote abortion access, including Planned Parenthood.
The archdiocese announced it will give the Nostra Aetate Award to the billionaire businessman and philanthropist Michael Sacks at the Oct. 29 banquet. He is CEO of the investment firm GCM Grosvenor, the president of Sacks Family Foundation, and a board member of the Obama Foundation.
Sacks, through his foundation, has donated to philanthropic efforts related to education, arts, veterans, and other issues. His contributions also include $500,000 to Planned Parenthood of Illinois from 2020 to 2022 and $600,000 to the Prairie State Access Fund in 2026, which was created by Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker with the help of philanthropists to support the “reproductive health ecosystem” of the state and combat federal restrictions “on abortion and gender affirming care.”
Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, has not publicly referenced Sacks’ support for these organizations. Rather, in a statement, he described Sacks as a “well-respected leader in Chicago and in the Jewish community.”
His statement explained the Nostra Aetate Award is named after the Second Vatican Council document of the same name, which was intended to build stronger relations with non-Christian religions, including Judaism.
“Honoring a leader, shaped by his Jewish faith, for the gifts he brings to society through his leadership, generosity and talent, acknowledges this shared divine heritage, distinct from specific contemporary political or doctrinal disputes,” Cupich said in his statement.
Cupich said the honor “recognizes [the personʼs] dignity” and role in the community “without implying an endorsement of every statement or stance” the person has. He said the recognition helps bring about “conditions necessary for principled dialogue” and that such dialogue “cannot occur if respect is contingent upon complete agreement on Church doctrine or political policy.”
The primary purpose of the banquet is to raise money for seminarians.
‘Scandalizing the faithful’
Pushback against Cupich for his decision to give the award to Sacks has come from the Chicago-based Illinois Right to Life, which was founded in 1968 to “honor the dignity and sanctity of human life at all stages.”
The pro-life group launched a petition “demanding [Cupich] withdraw his award to Planned Parenthood Financier Michael Sacks,” which has garnered nearly 4,000 signatures as of the day of the banquet.
Illinois Right to Life President Mary Kate Zander told EWTN News that the archdiocese has not responded to the petition. Because Cupich stood by his plan to give Sacks the award, the group will hold a protest outside of the IBEW Local 134 in Chicago, where the banquet will be held.
“Weʼre concerned about the scandal that it creates,” Zander, who is Catholic, told EWTN News when asked about the primary motivation for the protest.
In addition to concerns about the funding of organizations that promote abortion access, Illinois Right to Life has noted Sacks in 2013 signed a letter endorsing same-sex marriage and helped organize business leaders to advocate for it, according to local media reports. Equality Illinois, an LGBT advocacy group, gave Sacks its 2015 Equality Illinois Business Leadership Award in recognition of his role.
Zander said Cupich is “leading people astray and is scandalizing the faithful” by honoring Sacks. She said “we’re also concerned with this man’s soul” and said the cardinal has a responsibility to “hold people accountable … on their public stances.”
Illinois Right to Life alleged granting Sacks the award violates rules set by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
The USCCB document “Catholics in Political Life” states: “The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.”
The USCCB did not immediately reply to a request for comment on whether Cupich’s decision violates any USCCB rules. EWTN News also reached out to GCM Grosvenor to request a comment from Sacks but did not receive a response.
Cupich doubles down
In his Oct. 26 statement about the Nostra Aetate Award, Cupich acknowledged his decision created backlash but did not mention any concerns related to Sacks’ position on abortion or same-sex marriage.
Rather, Cupich said the archdiocese received criticism for its decision to “honor a person who does not hold to core beliefs of the Catholic Church, primary among them being the divinity of Jesus Christ” and said the backlash was about Sacks’ Jewish faith.
“Refusing to honor or engage with Jews solely because they hold conflicting religious or political positions can risk mimicking historic patterns of antisemitism through exclusion and bigotry, which, frighteningly, is on the rise,” he said. “Nostra Aetate urges us to be proactive in separating personal and community respect from doctrinal agreement, ensuring that disagreement does not regress into hostility or social ostracization. This we cannot tolerate.”
Nostra Aetate states that the Church “decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.” On the 60th anniversary of the document, Pope Leo XIV said “all of my predecessors have condemned antisemitism with clear words” since the Second Vatican Council, “and so I too confirm that the Church does not tolerate antisemitism and fights against it, on the basis of the Gospel itself.”
Cupich’s statement does not name the critics he is referring to. The archdiocese did not immediately respond to an inquiry for clarification.
Zander said Illinois Right to Life is “the only organization that has formally put out any kind of statement” about the award and their concern “has nothing to do with that.” She said Cupich’s statement “is confusing for people” who may infer that his decision to double down “is a response to antisemitism” and the disagreement is “an issue of this man not being Catholic.”
“[Cupich is] distracting from the fact that this man is clearly a supporter of abortion at a very grand scale,” Zander said. “… He’s trying to distract from the fact that [he is also] a same-sex marriage supporter.”
“The cardinal doesn’t want that to be the conversation,” she said. “He wants the conversation to be about that man’s faith background; his ethnic background.”
None of the criticisms published by Illinois Right to Life comment on Sacks’ Jewish faith or ethnic identity.
Last year, Illinois Right to Life launched a similar campaign against Cupich’s decision to give an award to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, who consistently voted in favor of abortion access. Durbin, who is Catholic, declined the award amid the backlash, which included criticisms from other bishops.
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We read from Cupich: “Refusing to honor or engage with Jews solely because they hold conflicting religious or political positions [only religious or political?] can risk mimicking historic patterns of antisemitism through exclusion and bigotry, which, frighteningly, is on the rise.”
“Bigotry”??? Cardinal Cupich is confused about elementary REALITY and the nature of fetal infanticide. On this kind of conceptual retardation, we also note that Sack’s coalition of pro-LGBTQ corporations has no understanding of ARITHMETIC, and that both Cupich and the boardrooms have no understanding of the CONSTITUTION.
Three points and a summary:
FIRST, the Church’s “political” position (say what?) does not assert that morality is true because of Church doctrine, but rather that doctrine is what it is because of what is true. When Pope St. John Paul II explicitly (!) incorporated the Natural Law and moral absolutes into the Church’s ordinary magisterium, he reminded us that “The Church is no way the author [!] or the arbiter of this [‘moral’] norm” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 95).
SECOND, in their amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court supporting the oxymoron of gay “marriage,” Sack’s coalition of corporations argued that such would add one Billion dollars a year to the nation’s Gross National Product (GNP). For this microscopic increment they would overturn millennia of human civilization!
The blip of one billion dollars per year pencils out as One part in 6,820 of one percent of the federal budget in 2021 ($6.82 Trillion, while the GNP was nearly four times this figure at $25 Trillion). By comparison, the Federal bailout for COVID was one Trillion dollars per year (for four years), or one thousand times (!) one billion in each year. (Among the nearly four hundred corporations and business organizations that weighed in were such Wall Street luminaries as AT&T and Verizon, Dow Chemical, Bank of America, General Electric, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, and the San Francisco Giants.)
Under their politicized new math, the business world gave an entirely new meaning to the term: “bottom line”!
THIRD, when the Court, itself, fabricated its argument in support of gay “marriage,” Supreme Court Justice John Roberts commented, “have your celebration, but this is not constitutional.” In time, this ruling will be reversed, as was the earlier fiction of Roe v. Wade.
SUMMARY: Cupich seems to be among those weak seminarians who were processed through business-as-usual curricula. We will not be truly free until that tribe is either converted to functional literacy and the “coherence of Faith and Reason” or else shuffles off to its eternal reward.
We read from Cupich: “Refusing to honor or engage with Jews solely because they hold conflicting religious or political positions [only religious or political?] can risk mimicking historic patterns of antisemitism through exclusion and bigotry, which, frighteningly, is on the rise.”
One of the singularly stupidest excuses for honoring a pro-abort ever given. Congratulations Cardinal!
Disgraceful, but not surprising.
Give Mother Theresa an award posthumously.
Good grief.
Does the episcopate any longer have any credence? What is Roman Catholicism with an episcopate such as this? When is enough enough?
Cupich went rogue decades ago, and lionized by Bergoglio.
The center will not hold, and when it collapses who will be to blame?
Not the SSPX.
So the answer to having ‘principled dialogue’ with an agent of policies contrary to sacred moral principles we award them.
Makes sense. If you’re a collaborateur. And that’s what Cardinal Cupich is when we consider his own positions on the referenced issues in context of mitigation, and mercy .
I believe Cardinal Cupich tendered his mandatory resignation a few years ago when he turned 75.
Hopefully Chicago will have a new archbishop in the next year or so.
Based on Cupich’s actions, he seems indistinguishable from a Methodist, Episcopalian, or other Protestant. It is difficult to understand how he holds his current position. One would expect some form of correction to deepen his understanding of Church doctrine and the close connection between doctrine, our words, and our actions.