Pope Leo XIV was leaving the papal villa near Rome at the end of September. He faced a gaggle of cameras and microphones, per usual. “Can I ask you a question in English?” a reporter from the American Catholic news agency EWTN asked him. “One question in English,” the relatively new Bishop of Rome granted.
“I just wanted to ask one thing that has become a bit of a divisive subject in the U.S. right now, with Cardinal Cupich giving an award to Sen. Durbin,” EWTN reporter Valentina Di Donato said. “Some people of faith are having a hard time with understanding this because he is pro, or rather, he is for legalized abortion. How would you help people of faith right now decipher that, feel about that? And how do you feel about that?”
Leo began with a quiet “heh” to himself. If involuntary, it was nervous laughter. If intentional, he likely realized what a nettlesome question this was.
“I’m not terribly familiar with the particular case,” the pontiff said, but he soldiered on anyway, calling it “very important to look at the overall work that a senator has done during, if I’m not mistaken, 40 years of service in the United States Senate.”
Durbin’s lifetime achievement
The pope’s off-the-cuff answer was within spitting distance of Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) actual tenure in Congress. He spent 14 years in the House and will have spent an additional 30 years in the Senate by the time he leaves office in early 2027. Durbin announced his impending retirement in April.
Chicago Archbishop and Cardinal Blase Cupich was going to honor Durbin’s long time in office with a lifetime achievement award from the diocese’s Office of Human Dignity and Solidarity, to be awarded in November. This announcement drew considerable opposition from American Catholics because of Durbin’s posture on a number of issues.
Ten fellow American bishops weighed in against the award. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights agitated against it as well. “The reason is simple: There has never been an abortion he couldn’t justify,” Catholic League President Bill Donohue wrote in a general call for Catholics to bring pressure to bear on Durbin to forgo the honor.
Though Durbin was elected to Congress in 1982 as a pro-life Democrat, he quickly flipped on the issue. Durbin has defended what he calls “Roe v. Wade thinking” for most of his time in Congress and all of his years in the Senate.
Donohue added that Durbin’s “voting record on other matters is also in opposition to core Catholic teachings,” and separately listed Durbin’s support of same-sex marriage and his “probing of the religious convictions of Catholic nominees for the federal bench” as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee as among those “other matters.”
For instance, Durbin — who, let’s remember, is Catholic — asked future Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, “Do you consider yourself an orthodox Catholic?” during her confirmation hearing for the secular office of a judgeship with the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017. This formed part of a one-two punch when the late Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein complained, “The dogma lives loudly within you,” as a reason for opposing Barrett’s confirmation.
The protests were of sufficient volume that Durbin had second thoughts on the award front. He informed Cupich on Sept. 30.
Cupich said, “Sen. Durbin today informed me that he has decided not to receive an award at our Keep Hope Alive celebration. While I am saddened by this news, I respect his decision.”
The archbishop added, “But I want to make clear that the decision to present him an award was specifically in recognition of his singular contribution to immigration reform,” having co-sponsored the original DREAM Act, “and his unwavering support of immigrants, which is so needed in our day.”
Nevertheless, Cupich, who is considered on the left of the Catholic Church in America, reiterated the old “seamless garment” approach to politics pioneered by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. Seamless garment Catholics rejected the prioritization of abortion as a preeminent social concern in favor of what they call a “consistent life ethic.”
The seamless garment lumps opposition against abortion and euthanasia, the twin concerns of the U.S. pro-life movement at its founding, in with a whole host of other issues, including the death penalty, war, poverty, the environment, and other causes of injustice, including the deportation of illegal immigrants.
In Cupich’s estimation, Durbin’s opposition to the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion might not be ideal, as official sources put the number of legal American abortions since Roe v. Wade in 1973 well north of 60 million. But Durbin’s support for legal abortion was, in some sense, mitigated by his support for mass immigration or by his legislative efforts to end the federal death penalty, so that the diocese could give him a lifetime achievement award in good conscience.
“We are not a one-issue church,” Cupich warned after Durbin withdrew, and “ideological isolation all too easily leads to interpersonal isolation, which only undermines Christ’s wish for our unity.”
Leo muddies the water
But back to that papal villa. At roughly the same time as Cupich was publicly licking his wounds, Leo offered a salve. In his brief answer, the pope admitted the “difficulty and the tensions.” Nevertheless, he thought it “important to look at many issues that are related to what is the teaching of the church” and offered scenarios.
“Someone who says, ‘I am against abortion,’ but says, ‘I am in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life,” Leo pronounced. Further, “Someone who says that ‘I am against abortion, but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life,” he said.
The remainder of the pope’s answer whipsawed between doubt and absolute certainty. On the one hand, these are “complex issues,” and he didn’t “know if anyone has all the truth on [those issues].” He thus called for “greater respect for one another” as we “search together to … find the way forward as a church.” On the other hand, he added, “The church teaching on each one of those issues is very clear.”
For his part, Durbin was “overwhelmed” by the pope’s words. “It is amazing to me,” he told NBC News. “It’s quite a moment. I didn’t expect it. I didn’t know it was gonna happen.” At press time, he had not reversed course and agreed to accept the award, but that seemed within the realm of possibility in a way that had been inconceivable before Leo fielded the question.
Many conservative Catholics were surprised along with Durbin, and not in a good way. Ten American bishops had felt “compelled, by their duty as defenders of the faith, to oppose the Durbin award,” respected analyst Phil Lawler granted, writing in Catholic Culture, but that number was tiny in the overall American Catholic hierarchy.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops website reports the overall number of active and retired bishops in the U.S. at 440. Lawler rightly observed that “most of the American hierarchy has remained silent.” He predicted Leo’s words would “probably ensure that timid bishops … will maintain that silence.”
He also took issue with the pope’s remarks directly. A faithful Catholic “can be pro-life and still support the death penalty,” Lawler argued, “unless centuries of Catholic teaching can be discarded.” In fact, “many theologians” of the past “held that the sanction of capital punishment as a punishment for murder is an affirmation of the Church’s horror at the unjust taking of a human life.”
As for Leo’s claim about America’s “inhuman” treatment of illegal immigrants, Lawler charged “spectacular rhetorical excess.” Certainly “faithful Catholics may criticize ICE tactics,” he said, but ICE isn’t “killing people,” and the immigration debate as a whole “is in no way commensurate with the debate over the killing of unborn children.”
American pope, Pandora’s box
There appeared to be nothing premeditated about Leo’s remarks. A reporter asked. He stumbled through an answer and has shown some second thoughts, at least about how his words were received. “I prefer not to comment at this time about choices made, political choices within the United States,” he said a few weeks later when reporters pressed him with an immigration question.
The most extraordinary thing about the exchange was that it could happen at all. Over the last 500 years, the average papal response to the question, “Can I ask you a question in English?” would have been an Italian shrug. But even after the election of the Polish John Paul II remade the modern papacy into a more international institution and most popes could speak some English, they rarely spoke it well, or with a Chicago accent.
When the College of Cardinals elected Bishop Robert Prevost to be pope in May, this caught most observers flatfooted. Before Leo appeared over St. Peter’s Square, it was a long-held assumption by most papal shot callers that the Catholic Church would never elect an American citizen as pope.
That glass ceiling existed for a number of reasons. First, America is the world’s preeminent military superpower, and the Vatican, by membership, the world’s largest spiritual authority, is often at odds with it diplomatically. Second, American Catholicism has been known to pull against world currents as well. The previous pope named Leo (XIII) denounced a collection of heresies grouped under the term “Americanism.” Third, though Catholics make up the single largest religious group in the U.S., they are a distinct minority if you lump all Protestant denominations together.
It’s plausible that most cardinals viewed Prevost as only incidentally American. Yes, he was born and raised near Chicago, but missionary work had taken him to Peru, where he became a citizen. It was there that he was made a bishop. Both Leo and his predecessor, Pope Francis, were South American bishops, and that is the continent where the faith is currently the most prevalent. Brazil, for instance, has the largest Catholic population in the world.
Yet that is not how many Americans viewed the new pope. Leo was known to be a Chicago White Sox fan. The baseball team celebrated his election in several ways, including adding a new mural to the ballpark.
President Donald Trump is a thrice-married nominal Presbyterian. Nevertheless, he expressed in a press conference at the time the sentiment of a broad swath of Americans, Catholic and otherwise, toward Leo’s election. “To have the pope from the United States of America, that’s a great honor,” Trump said.
Still, some American Catholics (including this one, for the record) were wary of an American pope, thinking that the peculiar concerns of the Catholic Church in America would not map well onto the whole of the global church. For instance, it’s a reasonable inference that the words of the EWTN reporter that were the most triggering to Leo were not “Senator Durbin” or even “abortion” but rather “Cardinal Cupich.”
The Chicago cardinal’s enthusiastic support reportedly made some difference at the conclave that made Leo pope. Given the opportunity, Leo then paid that support back at a time when the Chicago prelate was under fire.
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Cupich had tangled with pro-life groups before this most recent controversy, possibly owing to his very political instincts. When asked in May what the sentiment was like in Chicago about the election of a new pope who is from Illinois, he told the Jesuit magazine America, “They’re very excited. I heard already from various political leaders and others in the city.” He did get around to talking about a temporary uptick in church attendance, but note that political leaders were top of mind.
The Chicago archbishop also expressed high hopes for this “American who speaks like an American to the American people.” He called Leo’s papacy an “opportunity for the church to have another platform to speak about the social gospel, maybe in a way that American Catholics haven’t heard before.”
Jeremy Lott is the author of several books, most recently The Three Feral Pigs and the Vegan Wolf.
