One of the nation’s most influential Catholic figures had the chance to issue a moral challenge to some of his country’s most powerful politicians recently — and failed to do so.

Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Catholic archbishop of Chicago, gave the invocation at the Democrats’ national convention Aug. 19 while one of Planned Parenthood’s mobile clinics provided free abortions and vasectomies less than two miles from the convention site, Chicago’s United Center.

Yet Cupich said nothing.

Conservative Catholics expressed outrage:

• Mary Kate Zander, executive director of Illinois Right to Life, on Aug. 20: “Cardinal Cupich missed a clear opportunity last night to condemn [the Democrats’] vile, murderous policies and, in effect, betrayed the vibrant pro-life community that he once aligned himself with in our state.”

• Phil Lawler, editor of the website Catholic Culture, alluding to the Democrats’ support for abortion on demand: “(N)owhere in his invocation did Cardinal Cupich offer the slightest challenge to the perverse ideology that ruled the Democratic convention.”

• Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former papal nuncio to the United States, said Cupich’s silence reflects “the blood pact between the globalist deep state and the Bergoglian deep church.”

Viganò’s comment explains everything.

As one of Pope Francis’s ideological lackeys, Cupich vigorously supports the pope’s agenda of deemphasizing abortion in favor of environmental sustainability, unlimited immigration, and economic redistribution. Francis’s positions reflect the Vatican’s embrace of globalist, materialist utopianism defined by the United Nations’ Agenda 2030.

Subversion through Dilution

Two episodes in the past five years illustrate Cupich’s role in that agenda. In 2019, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops was discussing a supplement to its voting guide, Cupich tried introducing an amendment that would essentially nullify a statement saying, “Abortion remains our preeminent priority because it directly attacks life itself.”

Cupich wanted to include a paragraph from one of Francis’s apostolic exhortations, warning against Catholics behaving as if “the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause that they themselves defend.” The cardinal added that Francis wants to ensure “that we do not make one issue that a political party or group puts forward (preeminent) to the point where we’re going to ignore all the rest of them,” he said.

The bishops became divided on how to phrase the proposed amendment, with Cupich insisting they include the paragraph verbatim. Eventually, the bishops voted against it.

Some bishops “noted that Cupich has a regular habit of calling for greater use of the pope’s texts in conference documents,” reported Catholic News Agency. “One bishop called this habit ‘obsequious.’”

Subversion through Confrontation

Two years later, Cupich ignored his fellow bishops entirely.

In the wake of Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration, the cardinal opposed the USCCB’s public criticism of Biden’s support for abortion.

“For the nation’s bishops, the continued injustice of abortion remains the ‘preeminent priority,’” Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, the USCCB’s president, wrote in a statement issued on Inauguration Day. “Abortion is a direct attack on life that also wounds the woman and undermines the family.

“Rather than impose further expansions of abortion and contraception, as he has promised, I am hopeful that the new President and his administration will work with the Church and others of good will … to address the complicated cultural and economic factors that are driving abortion and discouraging families.”

Cupich called Gomez’s statement “ill-considered.”

“Aside from the fact that there is seemingly no precedent for doing so, the statement, critical of President Biden, came as a surprise to many bishops, who received it just hours before it was released,” he said.

The Jesuit magazine America called the cardinal’s response “a rare public rebuke … from one of its members.”

Subversion through Deception

But Cupich’s behavior reflects Francis’s own priorities. Despite his rhetoric, which included equating abortion to “hiring a hitman,” the pope’s actions demonstrate his willingness to sacrifice the Church’s historic opposition to his geopolitical agenda, as The Stream has often reported.

The most obvious example came in 2021, when Cardinal Luis Ladaria, the Vatican’s head of doctrine at the time, asked American bishops essentially to ignore canon law and allow elected officials who support abortion to receive communion. Those officials include two of Francis’s favorites: Biden and the former U.S. House Speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

“It would be misleading,” Ladaria wrote, “to give the impression that abortion and euthanasia alone constitute the only grave matters of Catholic moral and social teaching that demand the fullest level of accountability on the part of Catholics.”

Ladaria even used the term “pro-choice” to refer to abortion advocates.

In 2017, Francis honored Emma Bonino for her work with African refugees. Bonino, a former member of the Italian and European parliaments and a left-wing activist, performed illegal abortions in Italy and supported legalizing abortion. Yet the pope ranked her “among the greats of today’s Italy.”

Last year, the Vatican offered a tepid response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, as expressed in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper.

“The protection and defense of human life is not an issue that cannot remain confined to the exercise of individual rights but instead is a matter of broad social significance,” the editorial read. “It is a question of developing political choices that promote conditions of existence in favor of life without falling into a priori ideological positions. This also means ensuring adequate sexual education, guaranteeing health care accessible to all and preparing legislative measures to protect the family and motherhood, overcoming existing inequalities … .” (Emphasis added.)

Francis’s Twitter account at the time not only failed to mention the Supreme Court’s decision; it made no mention of abortion at all.

Perhaps Francis chose not to embarrass one of his closest advisors: Columbia Economics Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who wrote the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. In his book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Sachs wrote that abortion is “a lower-cost option” to prevent the birth of “unwanted children.”

The Porridge of Intellectual Fashion

Why would Francis make such a man an advisor? Because five decades before he became pope in 2013, the Vatican embraced globalist, materialist utopianism at the Second Vatican Council, as The Stream has reported.

Three papal encyclicals that built on each other — John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (1963), Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967), and Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate (2009) — called for “a public authority with power,” as John wrote, to ensure “the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and, finally, the necessary social services.” Such an organization, Paul added, ultimately would create “a new juridical order.”

Benedict took such concepts to their logical extents. The late pope advocated creating an authority “with teeth” that would “manage the global economy … to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace, to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration.” If the UN could not undertake such responsibilities, Benedict argued, a new organization must be formed.

Benedict’s “true world political authority,” he wrote, would use its comprehensive power “to ensure compliance from all parties,” thereby eliminating the nation-state. The agency’s ultimate goal, he added, would be to govern a “directed” global economy that would “open up the unprecedented possibility of large-scale redistribution of wealth on a world-wide scale.”

Benedict’s goals match the UN’s Agenda 2030.

In 2015 at the United Nations, Francis called Agenda 2030 “an important sign of hope.” Four years later at a Vatican conference, the pope described the plan as “a great step forward for global dialogue, marking a vitally ‘new and universal solidarity,’” he said, quoting from Laudato Si, his encyclical on the environment.

But what does this have to do with abortion?

Agenda 2030 lists “Gender Equality” as one of its goals. But the UN’s definition contradicts historic Catholic teaching on abortion and birth control. The six targets for meeting that goal include securing “universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights.” That means “adolescent girls and young women aged 15-19” should “make their own informed decisions regarding sexual relations, contraceptive use and reproductive health care.”

Not for nothing does Sachs, the author of those sustainability goals and a papal advisor, support abortion.

And not for nothing did Cupich fail to confront the issue at the Democrats’ convention last week. With the Vatican willing to destroy its own moral credibility for the sake of a utopian globalist agenda he supports, why would he?

Joseph D’Hippolito is a freelance writer who has written commentaries for such outlets as The Jerusalem Post, American Thinker, and Front Page Magazine.