Stage two has arrived in our “How-Catholic-is-the-Pope?” quest. First we had the interview with Crux and now we have “Cupichgate”.
Pope Leo was asked about Cardinal Cupich’s award to the pro-abortionist Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat representing Illinois. In fact Senator Durbin has since refused the award but we are left with the papal commentary on the strategy.
Ten US bishops had protested against the award. Others were expected to follow, but the spotlight has moved onto Pope Leo himself and his commentary.
It looks as though a pattern may be emerging. And if so, the pattern is that the bottom line each time is that Church teaching is not going to change under this Pope.
We can be grateful that in both interviews he could not have made it more clear that Catholic Church teaching remains inviolable.
But it is in the meandering theological – and political – commentary that precedes the conclusion that we discover difficulties.
I would like to be positive. I would like to love my Pope. I want to avoid being castigated as a so-called “pope-splainer". So to be clear: I am still slightly dizzy with relief that we no longer suffer what amounted to full-scale vertigo during confusion generated over Church teaching that we experienced formerly (under Pope Francis).
But in this analysis of Pope Leo, I am going to have to be critical. There is much to be critical of.
The essence of being a Catholic is that Church teaching does not change. So does it matter that a pope may be mistaken in some of this theological critique? It’s not ideal, but it is not the same as undermining the Magisterium. Different remarks in different contexts bear different weight.
So let’s begin with the thorny and provocative issue of context. Pope Francis had a habit of talking to reporters informally with occasionally truly dreadful consequences. The worst of which was “Who am I to judge?”.
Edward Feser, the Catholic philosopher, made the point well. He articulated what most of us have thought which is that it’s not a very good idea for the Pope to think on his feet when he’s confronted with reporters asking him questions. At least, that it’s not a good idea when the issue is a matter of dogmatic importance. And I think we can say that here it is literally a matter of life and death, certainly if you’re a newly conceived child.
It would be helpful if the Pope would take great care in what he says informally to journalists. All of us can and do mis-speak. Often we find ourselves saying things infelicitously under the pressure of ad hoc remarks and public scrutiny.
But what did the Pope tell us that was problematic regarding “Cupichgate”?
Perhaps the most alarming aspect to his interview was his defence of Cardinal Cupich. He might have addressed the scandal and concern that led ten fellow bishops to denounce the offer of an award. He didn’t. He sought to find an eirenic way forward, in order to maintain the peace, that minimised polarisation and maximised consensus.
We saw that in the Crux interview and commended it. But replicating it here appears to have involved a number of mistakes, and even errors.
We might offer him some small mitigation for his opening disclaimer that he was not fully acquainted with the facts of the case. But then he set out to establish a principle that has caused serious dissension and concern.
He used the “seamless garment” approach to Catholic ethics to link together abortion, immigration and the death penalty. Non-Catholic readers may not be familiar with this so a moment’s explanation is called for.
The “seamless garment” is a metaphor drawn from the Gospel of John (19:23), where Christ’s tunic is described as “without seam, woven from top to bottom”. In modern Catholic ethical discourse, the term was popularised by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in the 1980s to describe a consistent ethic of life.
Cardinal Bernardin argued that all life issues – abortion, euthanasia, war, poverty, capital punishment, racism – are connected. Just as the garment of Christ was seamless, so too should be the Church’s commitment to life and human dignity in every form. Of course they are connected but they do not share the same equivalence.
But it was just such an equivalence that Pope Leo suggested should be used to calm the debate over “Cupichgate”.
As Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, wrote in his 2004 memo on Communion and pro-abortion politicians:
“Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia … There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”
And this goes to the heart of the issue.
This was how Pope Leo sought to establish the equivalence:
“Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favour of the death penalty is not really pro-life. 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.”
But firstly we need to note that this is an abuse of the term “pro-life”. The phrase is merely US political shorthand for opposition to killing the innocent, such as the unborn. It has no theological significance whatsoever. One might as well argue that eating plants is not “pro-life” because it involves killing them.
The use of this phrase in this context suggests a left-leaning political reflex, which was already implicit in his unwillingness to hold Cardinal Cupich to any account.
Let’s leave aside what seems to me to a reprehensible attempt at a superficial political relativism by introducing immigration at this juncture, and deal instead with the claims about the death penalty.
The issue about the death penalty reaches much further back into Catholic ethics than the contemporary fixation of the Left on open borders.
Edward Feser confronts the false dichotomy about the death penalty:
“With due respect to the Pope, the remark is manifestly false. To cite just a few names among many, sainted doctors of the Church such as Thomas Aquinas, Alphonsus Liguori and John Henry Newman were against abortion and for the death penalty, as were sainted popes such as Innocent I, Pius V and Pius X. I imagine Leo would not dare to suggest these great heroes of the Catholic faith were ‘not really pro-life’.”
Given that in most of the exchanges in public media the force of this argument has not been acknowledged, Feser continues:
“The pope-splainers really need to knock it off with this Orwellian gaslighting. It just makes them look stupid or dishonest. There is no ‘Gee, what did they really mean?’ ambiguity whatsoever in what scripture or earlier popes such as St. Innocent I, Innocent III, St. Pius V, St. Pius X, Pius XII, et al., said about the issue of capital punishment.
“Indeed, in some cases (such as Innocent I and Innocent III) they spoke precisely to end debate on the matter and affirm that the liceity in principle of the death penalty is flatly a matter of Catholic orthodoxy.
"There is lucid consistency on this issue until Francis. The popesplainers who pretend otherwise by suggesting that maybe everyone has somehow been misunderstanding everything for two millennia succeed only in living up to the worst stereotypes peddled by Protestant and atheist critics of Catholic apologetics.
“When they attribute to the popes greater discretion vis-a-vis doctrine than the Church herself has ever said they have, they do not uphold papal authority but make a laughingstock of it.”
So is there anything to be said on this Pope’s behalf? Pope Leo justified his intervention and remarks by explaining his aim:
“We need to search together both as human beings, and as America citizens … as well as Catholics, to say we need to look closely at all of these ethical issues and to find the way forward.”
Well of course – that’s laudable in principle. Who can be against a shared search for truth?
And no doubt the Pope believed that he was pursuing the same approach that we praised him for with Crux. He wants to bring the whole Church with him, and as much of the surrounding society as he is able.
But this cannot be done at the expense of truth and other more compelling principles.
Archbishop Naumann rightly intervened by pointing out: “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.”
One commentator on X acknowledged that the Pope began by admitting he did not know all the facts. We can help him there. But more worrying is that he may want to pursue conciliation and unity at the cost of the truth.
This is not a new conundrum. In Maths classes when I was younger we would get marked on two elements of the task. The answer and the “workings out”.
We can continue to be grateful that the bottom line is “the Church’s teaching does not change”. But the workings out between Pope Leo's statement of the problem and the final answer were too deeply flawed for our comfort and for our future peace of mind.
It’s not exactly the same, but we might find ourselves asking: since you can’t be “half pregnant” does the same rule apply for being “half-orthodox”?
How Catholic is the Pope? It seems with Pope Leo, we may still be finding out.
RELATED: Breaking apart Pope Leo’s coded Catholicism
Photo: Pope Leo XIV (image by Arcadia)
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