Cardinal Blase Cupich, the progressive Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, offered the invocation for the Democratic National Convention (DNC) Monday without ever mentioning Jesus Christ.
Calling him simply the “God of all creation,” Cardinal Cupich invoked the divinity without witnessing to Jesus or calling out the moral evil around him.
Planned Parenthood of America, the United States’ biggest abortion provider, publicly offered free abortions and vasectomies for the duration of the DNC, in keeping with its steadfast support for the Democratic party, which advocates abortion on demand during the nine months of pregnancy.
“Planned Parenthood has long been the driving force behind the culture of death,” American Life League President Judie Brown said in a statement.
“The Democratic party has been at the forefront of fueling the Planned Parenthood engine,” Brown said. “Now that PP has chosen to provide free child killing at the DNC, the combination, or should we say bloody wedding, is complete.”
In his anodyne address, Cardinal Cupich avoided abortion and all other relevant issues in the election to focus on niceness.
“May our nation become more fully a builder of peace in our wounded world with the courage to imagine and pursue a loving future together,” he said. “And may we as individual Americans become more fully the instruments of God’s peace.”
Let our responsibility to forge a new chapter in our nation’s history “be propelled by the women and men elected to serve in public life, who know that service is the mark of true leadership,” he said.
“And let this new chapter of our nation’s history be filled with overwhelming hope, a hope that refuses to narrow our national vision, but rather, as Pope Francis has said, ‘to dream dreams and see visions’ of what by your grace our world can become,” he said, without providing any relevant context.
Cardinal Cupich has regularly downplayed the centrality of abortion as a moral and political issue, insisting it must be seen as just one element of “a consistent ethic of life.”
In a signed 2015 op-ed in the Chicago Tribune, Cupich listed a series of social ills that people should find just as loathsome as ripping apart unborn children and selling their organs.
As appalling as it is “to speak freely of crushing a child’s skull to preserve valuable body parts,” Cupich wrote, we should be “no less appalled by the indifference toward the thousands of people who die daily for lack of decent medical care; who are denied rights by a broken immigration system and by racism; who suffer in hunger, joblessness and want; who pay the price of violence in gun-saturated neighborhoods; or who are executed by the state in the name of justice.”
At that time, the archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles J. Chaput, was quick to offer fraternal correction to his misguided brother bishop, penning his own essay titled “There Is No Equivalence.”
Attempts to equate the intentional taking of human life through abortion with other social justice issues – such as poverty, racism, and unemployment – are wrongheaded and deceptive, he said.
“The deliberate killing of innocent life is a uniquely wicked act,” Chaput wrote. “No amount of contextualizing or deflecting our attention to other issues can obscure that.”
Again in a 2019 op-ed, Cupich rejected prioritizing the abortion issue when considering “how our faith should inform our politics and our voting decisions.”
Cupich was named in a 2018 whistleblower report by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Vatican nuncio to the United States, and later released a statement expressing “astonishment” over allegations that disgraced former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was behind his appointment as archbishop of Chicago.
In his report, Archbishop Viganò referred to Cardinal Cupich as a man “blinded by his pro-gay ideology” who was appointed as archbishop outside of normal Church protocols because of the powerful backing of three influential cardinals, including McCarrick.
Cardinal Cupich denied being aware of having benefited personally from the patronage of Cardinal McCarrick.
“As to the issue of my appointment to Chicago as well as the question of episcopal appointments in general, I do not know who recommended me for the Archdiocese of Chicago,” he said, “but I do know that Pope Francis, like his predecessors, takes seriously the appointment of bishops as one of his major responsibilities.”
