Leading prayers for the culture of death

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 20, 2024

When Milwaukee’s Archbishop Jerome Listecki delivered the invocation for the Republican National Convention last month, he began with an appropriate challenge to all American politicians, reminding them: “Our Founding Fathers held the truth self-evident that all are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Thus, subtly but unmistakably, he put the right to life in the first paragraph of his prayer. He quickly added that “we have sustained this vision to guard the dignity of every life from conception to natural death.”

Unfortunately the Republican convention did not rise to the challenge, and the GOP platform for 2024 is missing the strong right-to-life language that previous conventions had adopted. But at least the archbishop had made an appeal to the consciences of the conventioneers. He had followed up, too, with a prayer for the protection of religious freedom: a prayer that sounds more pointed today, as Congress weighs legislation that would eliminate “conscience clause” protection for religious believers.

In closing his short prayer, Archbishop Listecki made his petitions “through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” To be fair, he was quoting the Inaugural Prayer of George Washington—who, in happier times, did not shy away from invoking the Lord’s name.

This week Cardinal Blase Cupich chose not to mention the name of Jesus in his invocation for the Democratic convention. Evidently fearful of offending against inter-faith sensitivities, he addressed the “God of all creation.”

The first petition in the cardinal’s prayer was that we might “truly understand and answer the sacred call of citizenship.” And what is that sacred call? He went on:

We are a nation composed of every people and culture, united not by ties of blood, but by the profound aspirations of life, freedom, justice, and unbound hope. These aspirations are why our forebears saw America as a beacon of hope. And, with your steady guidance, Lord, may we remain so today.

Hope was the main theme of the cardinal’s invocation. After praying for peace, he concluded with a petition that:

…this new chapter of our nation’s history be filled with overwhelming hope, a hope that refuses to narrow our national vision, but rather, as Pope Francis has said, “to dream dreams and see visions” of what by your grace our world can become.

The “hope” that Cardinal Cupich seeks here is not recognizable as the theological virtue of hope, oriented toward the fulness of life in Jesus Christ. It seems instead to be a vision of what “our world can become”—that is, an encouragement for political leaders to build a better future. And while there is nothing wrong with that aspiration, one expects a religious leader to make at least some passing reference to our eternal destiny: to the City of God, which surpasses any expectations we might set for the City of Man. Thus in his prayer for the Republican convention, Archbishop Listecki referred to the “pursuit of happiness through this life to the next. [emphasis added]

No doubt Archbishop Listecki could have given Republican politicians a stronger reminder that souls as well as votes are at stake when we ponder the meaning of the “pursuit of happiness.” But Cardinal Cupich faced a much greater challenge when he addressed the Democratic crowd in Chicago. He was speaking to a political party poised to make unrestricted abortion the defining issue of its 2024 campaign, a party that had welcomed Planned Parenthood to perform abortions for conventioneers, a party dedicated to eliminating “conscience rights” for doctors who don’t want to perform abortions and taxpayers who don’t want to subsidize them, a party that was pledged to help young people mutilate themselves in conformance with gender ideology, a party whose nominee has questioned whether a practicing Catholic could be qualified as a judicial nominee. On the whole constellation of moral issues that Pope John Paul II associated with the “culture of death,” the Democratic Party was and is squarely in opposition to Catholic teaching.

Yet nowhere in his invocation did Cardinal Cupich offer the slightest challenge to the perverse ideology that ruled the Democratic convention. Quite the contrary; the few passages in his prayer that might have been interpreted as references to current political issues sounded more like encouragement for the Democrats. When the cardinal spoke of “a nation composed of every people and culture,” was he nodding approval for the Democrats’ welcome to immigrants? When he decried “fear of the other,” was that a reference to the diversity-and-equity agenda? Certainly there was nothing in the cardinal’s invocation that could be read as even a hint of disapproval for the Democratic party’s platform.

The history of Christianity shows a steady contest between religious and secular influences: between the guidance of the Church and the power of the State. At their best, Church leaders correct and admonish political leaders. Even a fundamentally healthy state needs those corrections and admonitions, and wise statesmen welcome them. But a corrupt regime, which urgently needs correction, resents them. So weak churchmen become the cheerleaders for degraded ruling regimes.