Day: September 30, 2025

CNA Staff, Sep 30, 2025 / 20:02 pm (CNA).

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, will decline an award from the Archdiocese of Chicago after global backlash over his strong pro-abortion views that included comments from Pope Leo XIV and criticism from U.S. bishops.

Chicago archbishop Cardinal Blase Cupich announced Durbin’s decision in a Sept. 30 statement, revealing that Durbin informed the prelate that he “decided not to receive [the] award” at the archdiocesan Keep Hope Alive celebration on Nov. 5. Durbin was scheduled to receive a “Lifetime Achievement Award for support to immigrants” at the event.

Cupich’s announcement brings an end to a chaotic late September in which his brother bishops in the U.S. criticized the decision to grant Durbin the award, citing the Democratic senator’s long track record of pro-abortion politics.

The controversy even reached the Vatican itself, where on Sept. 30 Pope Leo XIV — responding to a question from EWTN News — said it was “important to look at the overall work that a senator has done [during] 40 years of service in the United States Senate.”

“I understand the difficulty and the tensions,” the Holy Father said. “But I think as I myself have spoken in the past, it’s important to look at many issues that are related to the teachings of the Church.”

Multiple U.S. bishops and archbishops criticized the decision. Springfield, Illinois, Bishop Thomas Paprocki, who presides over Durbin’s home diocese, described the senator as “unfit to receive any Catholic honor.”

‘Total condemnation is not the way forward’

In his lengthy statement on Tuesday, Cupich said the decision to grant Durbin the award “was specifically in recognition of his singular contribution to immigration reform and his unwavering support of immigrants, which is so needed in our day.”

The prelate said divisions within the Catholic Church have “dangerously deepen[ed]” over the course of the half-century that he has served as a priest and the more-than-quarter-century he has served as a bishop.

“The tragedy of our current situation in the United States is that Catholics find themselves politically homeless,” he said. “The policies of neither political party perfectly encapsulate the breadth of Catholic teaching.”

The archbishop argued against “total condemnation” of Catholic politicians who fail to adhere to the “essential elements” of Catholic social teaching. Such broad criticism, he said, “shuts down discussion.”

“But praise and encouragement can open it up, by asking their recipients to consider how to extend their good work to other areas and issues,” he said. “More broadly, a positive approach can keep alive the hope that it is worth talking to one another — and collaborating with one another — to promote the common good.”

Cupich said he had hoped that the Keep Hope Alive celebration would raise awareness of the similarity between the Church’s defense of migrants and its defense of “the vulnerable on the border between life and death.” He argued, meanwhile, that the Chicago Archdiocese was not “softening” its position on abortion.

“The Catholic bishops heroically responded when the right to life of the unborn was negated by the 1973 decisions of the Supreme Court,” he said. “That right to life still needs to be defended without compromise.” The U.S. bishops have likewise “long invested our energy and resources” in defending immigrants, he said.

The archbishop in his statement proposed “synodal gatherings” for Catholics “to experience listening to each other with respect on these issues, all the while remaining open to maturing more fully in their common identity as Catholics.” Cupich said he would be seeking input on those gatherings.

“We can move forward if we Keep Hope Alive,” he said.

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Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 30, 2025 / 18:42 pm (CNA).

Cardinal Robert McElroy delivered a homily on Sunday urging Catholics to “embrace in a sustained, unwavering, prophetic, and compassionate way” migrants to the U.S. at a Mass for the 11th World Day of Migrants and Refugees. 

“For the past 110 years, Mass has been celebrated throughout our country to honor and support immigrants and refugees who have come to our nation as part of that stream of men and women from every land who have built up the United States into a great nation,” McElroy said in his homily at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Northwest D.C. on Sept. 28.  

“But this year is different from the 110 years that have preceded it,” he said, “for this year we are confronting — both as a nation and as a Church — an unprecedented assault upon millions of immigrant men and women and families in our midst.”

McElroy described the Trump administration’s approach to immigration as “a comprehensive campaign to uproot millions of families” that “relies on fear and terror at its core.” The Trump administration’s goal, he said, “is simple and unitary: to rob undocumented immigrants of any real peace in their lives so that in misery they will ‘self-deport.’” 

Addressing the administration’s assertion that all migrants who enter the country illegally should be removed, McElroy argued that the Gospel “proposes a far different measure” that migrants are “our neighbors.” 

Referencing the parable of the good Samaritan, McElroy argued that “the most striking element” of the story was “that the Samaritan was willing to reject the norms of society which said that because of his birth and status he had no obligation to the victim, who was a Jew.” 

“The piercing insight and glory of the Samaritan was that he rejected the narrowness and myopia of the law to understand that the victim he was passing by was truly his neighbor and that both God and the moral law obligated him to treat him as neighbor,” he stated. 

McElroy referenced the Catholic community in Washington, D.C., who he said has witnessed many migrants of faith who “have been swept up and deported in the crackdown which has been unleashed in our nation.”

“We are witnessing a comprehensive governmental assault designed to produce fear and terror among millions of men and women who have through their presence in our nation been nurturing precisely the religious, cultural, communitarian, and familial bonds that are most frayed and most valuable at this moment in our country’s history,” McElroy said.

McElroy noted that Catholic social teaching categorizes border security and the deportation of criminals convicted of “serious crimes” as legitimate national goals.

However, he said, “at times, our government asserts that these goals constitute the essence and scope of its immigration enforcement efforts, and if that were true Catholic teaching would raise no objection.”

Ultimately, the cardinal called on Catholics to “form our stance and action as people of faith,” to “stand in solidarity with the undocumented men and women whose lives are being upended by the government’s campaign of fear and terror.”

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Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 30, 2025 / 18:22 pm (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV on Tuesday said the U.S. Department of Defense secretary’s way of speaking about war is “worrying.”

Addressing an audience of military brass summoned to Virginia, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sept. 30 urged senior officers to lead with an eye on more “lethality.” President Donald Trump this month signed an executive order changing the department’s name to Department of War, although it has not been officially changed by Congress.

Asked about the secretary’s meeting with the generals and comments about readiness for war, Pope Leo said: “This way of speaking is worrying, because it shows each time an increase in tensions — this vocabulary, even shifting from ‘Minister of Defense’ to ‘Minister of War.’ Let’s hope it is only a way of speaking. Certainly, they have a style of government where they want to show strength, to put pressure, and we hope it works, but that there will not be war. One must always work for peace.”

The Chicago-born Pope Leo spoke to reporters as he was leaving the papal villa of Castel Gandolfo near Rome, where in recent weeks he has made it a practice to spend Tuesdays before returning to the Vatican.

The pope’s comments were translated from Italian.

The Defense Department did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

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