Cardinal Blase Cupich

By Raimundo Rojas, Outreach Director

National Right to Life

I’ve waited to write this. Since the announcement of Cardinal Blase Cupich’s plans to honor Michael Sacks, I have carried a bit of a sadness I cannot fully put into words. I have tried to understand his decision, to find an explanation that would reconcile it with the Church I love and the faith my family suffered to preserve.

I cannot. The award, the gala, and the ceremony are wrapping up as I write this on the evening of October 29.

Here’s the thing: I was born into communist Cuba in 1961, during the Bay of Pigs invasion. I was also born into a deeply Catholic family, so much so that my father and his older brother served as altar boys in their youth.

By the time I was born, Castro’s revolution was well into its violent campaign against the Catholic Church, and church closings were underway. The regime had arrested priests and expelled religious orders. For families like mine, practicing Catholicism required courage that most Americans will never have to contemplate.

One of my earliest childhood memories remains painfully clear.

I was perhaps five or six years old when I saw men bring my father into my grandmother’s home. He was bloodied and bruised. I remember his condition more vividly than anything else about that day. A little boy looking at his father, unable to understand why anyone would hurt him so terribly.

Many years later, I learned what had happened.

It was September 8, the feast of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, Cuba’s beloved patroness. My father was only 27 years old. He and a group of young Catholic men had tried to open a church so they could gather and pray on her feast day.

They just wanted to pray, but the state declared it a grave offense.

As they approached the church, they encountered a crowd that included police officers in civilian clothes and members of our own community. The men who had gathered to worship suffered a brutal beating, and some were arrested. My father and a couple of his friends escaped and made their way home.

Years later, as an adult, I asked my parents another question that had troubled me. Why had they waited until I was almost two years old to baptize me?

Their answer revealed another sacrifice.

Baptizing their child carried real danger. They could not simply walk into their parish church on a Sunday morning, surrounded by family and friends. Instead, they drove at night to a village outside the city, where a priest agreed to baptize me in secret.

No relatives gathered, no joyful reception, no photographs of a beautiful church filled with smiling faces. Just my parents, my godparents, who themselves accepted considerable risk, a priest, and a little boy. My parents took those risks because they believed their child belonged to God.

Also, I have spent much of my adult life defending unborn children, representing National Right to Life at the United Nations, and confronting those who seek to redefine human dignity to exclude the most defenseless among us. My Catholic faith helped solidify that conviction.

Which brings me, with heartfelt sorrow, to Cardinal Cupich.

The Archbishop of Chicago has chosen to honor billionaire businessman and philanthropist Michael Sacks with the Archdiocese’s Nostra Aetate Award at tonight’s Rerum Novarum banquet, an event that supports the formation of future priests.

This is what pro-life groups have discovered in the published reports and foundation records: “The Sacks Family Foundation contributed approximately $500,000 to Planned Parenthood of Illinois between 2020 and 2022. Sacks and his wife also reportedly contributed $600,000 to an initiative supporting abortion access in Illinois.”

These are major financial commitments to organizations and initiatives that endorse and promote  abortion, an act the Catholic Church unequivocally condemns. Cardinal Cupich has defended the honor as recognition of Sacks’ leadership and contributions to the Jewish community, invoking Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration concerning the Church’s relationship with non-Christian religions.

I respect the Jewish people and the sacred relationship between our faiths. The objection has nothing to do with Mr. Sacks’ religion. It concerns his financial support for abortion and the decision of a Catholic cardinal to honor him publicly. Cardinal Cupich argues that honoring someone does not endorse every position that person holds.

I understand the distinction he’s trying to make. But an award is an intentional public expression of admiration. The Church has a responsibility to consider the moral consequences of the honors it bestows.

What troubles me especially is the setting. Young men preparing for the priesthood will look to their bishops for examples of fidelity and courage. What will they learn from this decision about defending unborn children when doing so becomes uncomfortable?

I think of the priests in Cuba who lost their churches, their freedom, and sometimes their lives. I think of the priest who baptized me quietly in the night. I think of my godparents, who placed themselves in danger so a child could receive a sacrament.

And I think of my father. He did not have wealth or influence. In Cuba, only the communists did. He had a young family, a Catholic upbringing, and a desire to kneel inside a church on the feast of the Blessed Mother. For that, men beat him bloody.

I know Cardinal Cupich cannot remove what my parents endured. No public award can undo their courage or diminish what God saw in their sacrifices. But his decision makes those sacrifices seem terribly small in the eyes of the Church they loved. It makes my father’s beating, my parents’ fear, and the dangers my family accepted feel less worthy of consideration than the accomplishments of a wealthy man who has helped fund the destruction of unborn human life.

Perhaps that is why I have found this so difficult to write. I expected more from a prince of the Church. I expected him to understand what millennia of faithful Catholics have endured, and continue to endure, rather than compromise what they struggled to preserve.

My father suffered because he wanted to enter a church and pray. My parents risked their safety because they wanted their son baptized. And now, more than sixty years later, a cardinal of that same Church has chosen to honor a man whose financial support has helped advance the taking of innocent unborn lives.

I cannot reconcile those things.

May God have mercy on me, and on Cardinal Cupich.