Seamless garment? Cardinal Cupich mixes the metaphor.

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 24, 2025

Predictably, Cardinal Blase Cupich has defended his decision to honor Senator Richard Durbin despite criticism by Bishop Thomas Paprocki. Phil Lawler and I both wrote about this yesterday at about the same time, so I decided to wait another day to post my thoughts. Phil emphasized “The Cupich assault on episcopal unity”, making excellent points. But I want to to draw attention to the old bugbear that has caused such convenient confusion over the past generation and more, namely the “seamless garment” theory of morality.

The trigger for these discussions is that Cardinal Cupich has commended the pro-abortion Senator Durbin by naming him the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award, especially for his work “to advance Catholic social teaching in the areas of immigration, the care of the poor, Laudato Sí, and world peace.” There are actually two issues here, both of which Cupich addressed in his response to Paprocki.

The first is jurisdictional. One of the legs Bishop Paprocki stood on in his criticism of the award was his understanding that Senator Durbin resides in his diocese and has been barred from receiving Communion because of his promotion of abortion. To this, Bishop Cupich counters that “Senator Durbin informed me some years ago that he had purchased a condo in Chicago, registered in a parish of the archdiocese and considers me to be his bishop.” Well, I suppose I would too, if I were pro-abortion and wanted to shake the dust of the Diocese of Springfield off of my wayward feet. But the larger moral question is hardly a jurisdictional issue.

Indeed, the more important problem is moral. It arises in Cardinal Cupich’s strained effort to invoke the seamless garment theory of morality that had been championed by one of his more notorious predecessors in Chicago, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. Cupich claimed: “At the heart of the consistent ethic of life is the recognition that Catholic teaching on life and dignity cannot be reduced to a single issue….” But this, as usual, is nothing to the purpose. All of us have held faulty positions at one time or another in our lives, but it would seem obvious that any of us who did not currently uphold the right to life of innocent children ought not to be honored publicly by the Church for policies we may have pursued on more complex but primarily prudential matters.

Just to be clear: There is no scandal in defending the right to life for all innocent persons while arguing that immigration may be reasonably restricted. But there is great scandal in advocating greater opportunities for innocent immigrants while denying the right of other innocent persons to life itself. Unfortunately, the so-called “seamless garment” argument—whatever its rhetorical merits—has been most often used to justify emphasizing issues that are more popular in the dominant culture but have no morally absolute policy requirements, unlike the right to life.

It is not, for example, objectively immoral to advocate this or that restriction or expansion of immigration, which positions will ordinarily be prudential in character. But it is objectively immoral to advocate or even refuse to oppose murder, even if one typically works on other issues. It is also immoral in an especially particular and political way for a person in public office to refuse to work to protect those within his jurisdiction from being murdered.

Seamless or coming apart at the seams?

Sadly, more often than not, the seamless garment argument has been used to place those who advance more popular prudential causes on the same moral footing as those who prioritize the absolutely foundational (and frequently unpopular) right to life. Even worse, the seamless garment theory has very often been used to argue that those who defend the right to life of unborn children are morally at fault for not defending other positions with equal vigor—especially, again, those involving particular prudential judgments about which we may all legitimately disagree.

Indeed, the discussion of the “seamless garment” (or “consistent ethic of life”) has been almost hopelessly confused by two things: On the one hand, the refusal to distinguish absolute moral good and evil from prudential judgments; on the other, the wayward insistence that embracing something good in one area justifies the decision to do evil in other areas. In other words, the problem with the seamless garment theory is that it is almost always used to justify seams (or, as we might just as easily put it, the “consistent ethic of life” is almost always used to justify inconsistency).

An example of this abuse is the insistence that advocacy of what appears to be a positive prudential approach to one issue in one area can somehow be held to compensate for the advocacy of an absolute evil elsewhere. It ought to be an indicator of defeat rather than victory for the seamless garment argument that it has so often been used to place those who advocate particular prudential approaches to complex problems on an equal or even higher moral level than those who are willing to defend today’s least popular but most important and foundational good, that is, the right to life.

There is an even deeper social issue here. A culture convinced that happiness is primarily a byproduct of untrammeled individual freedom, especially sexual freedom, rather than a byproduct of apprehending truth and exercising virtue, will be forever advocating the abuse of sexuality in the service of individual pleasure. Amazingly, we have even reached the point where child-bearing is regarded as an individual freedom to be exercised apart from both the unitive marital act and the conception of the baby itself, no matter how many human beings must die to bring a “chosen” one to birth.

The reality is that all of this arises not from any appreciation for the seamless garment but from the secret desire to tear it to shreds—that is, not from a strong sense of the interconnectedness of all moral virtues but precisely from a manipulation of their potential disconnectedness. The whole point becomes this: We may claim to be virtuous based on our decision to advocate some aspect of the good that is sufficiently popular and at least somewhere on the spectrum, without paying the least attention either to the Author of the Good or to any coherent understanding of the Good as a whole.

In practice, people seem to wear the seamless garment primarily because it can be worn in any position, allowing them to choose exactly what they want others to see—that is, always the part, never the whole. Someone once called such persons hypocrites—who had already received their reward.