This does not appear very synodal.
(Jonathan Liedl/National Catholic Register) — The meetings of two groups of Illinois Catholic leaders chaired by Cardinal Blase Cupich were postponed indefinitely last week after a lay leader requested that the Chicago cardinal-archbishop’s controversial decision to honor a pro-abortion-rights senator be discussed.
John Breen, a board member of the Catholic Conference of Illinois (CCI), asked on Sept. 23 that Cardinal Cupich’s plan to give Sen. Dick Durbin a “lifetime achievement award” at an upcoming archdiocesan fundraiser be added to the agenda of a Sept. 25 board meeting because the honor risked undermining the group’s advocacy work.
“All of our work is premised upon the dignity of the human person,” said Breen, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago and the Diocese of Joliet’s lay representative on the CCI board. “And yet you’re going to honor a man who denies the dignity of a whole class of persons? It makes no sense. So, I don’t see why we, as a body, wouldn’t address the issue.”
But no discussion took place. The CCI board meeting, which had been scheduled months in advance, was canceled on Sept. 24, just one day before it was set to take place at the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Catholic cemeteries office. A separate meeting of Illinois’ bishops that was scheduled to follow, during which Cardinal Cupich had indicated the Durbin award would be discussed, was also canceled.
Read more at the National Catholic Register…
At Mass in the SJV Chapel on Laetare Sunday (March 14, 2021), Archbishop Blase Cardinal Cupich preaches a homily. Image credit (cropped from original): MTF-GR, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
