Sending Bishop Cupich to Chicago, Pope Francis brings new agenda to town

When Pope Francis named Spokane Bishop Blase J. Cupich, 64, as Chicago’s new archbishop, Cupich flew to Chicago for a press conference and praised 77-year-old Cardinal Francis George, who is battling cancer and will retire Nov. 17.

Bishops pay tribute to each other in such transitions, but differences between the two men are striking.

The Chicago archdiocese — with 2 million Catholics, a billion-dollar budget, 356 parishes and 244 schools — is an image of the American church writ large. It is also a national media platform: the pope traditionally elevates its archbishop to the College of Cardinals.

Spokane is a small diocese in the conservative western region of Washington state.

Chicago is the muscle of the midwest and a Democratic stronghold. Cardinal George has been a cultural warrior revered by conservatives for his rock-ribbed certitude, as when he said “one cannot favor the legal status quo on abortion and also be working for the common good,” writing off any pro-choice elected official, social worker or teacher.

Cupich cut a self-effacing image with the Chicago media late last month, calling himself “a pastor.”

His speeches, writings and encounters in Spokane suggest that he was aligned with Pope Francis’s ethos of radical mercy well before the cardinal of Buenos Aires became pope. And in many ways, Cupich appears to be an ideal choice to help fulfill Francis’ vision for the church. (Citing an overload of media requests, Cupich’s spokesman in Spokane denied a request for a telephone interview.)

“Racism can be called our nation’s own specific ‘original sin,’” Cupich wrote in an Oct. 27, 2008 essay in America, the Jesuit magazine, just before the election won by Barack Obama. Cupich made no endorsement, but spoke of historical memory:

The existence of slavery cast the shadow of hypocrisy over the otherwise noble proclamation of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in our Declaration of Independence. The greatest number of Americans killed in war to this day was during the Civil War, which had the conflict over slavery at its roots. For generations our political life was distorted by the influence of public officials whose foremost goal was to preserve the essence if not the form of slavery in a segregated and discriminatory social system.

Obama twice carried the state of Washington and in 2012 its voters passed a referendum legalizing gay marriage. The larger population lies in the more liberal eastern counties surrounding Seattle, where Microsoft and Boeing are headquartered. Cupich and the other state bishops opposed the referendum.

Writing in the diocese’s Inland Register, Cupich based his opposition to gay marriage on doctrinal grounds. But he went to great lengths in explaining the other side to his flock, pointing to “a compassion forged in reaction to tragic national stories of violence against homosexuals, of verbal attacks that demean their human dignity, and of suicides by teens who have struggled with their sexual identity or have been bullied because of it…This tends to frame the issue as a matter of equality in the minds of many people, a value that is deeply etched in our nation’s psyche.”

Daniel J. Morrissey, a Democrat and law professor at Jesuit-run Gonzaga University, got to know Cupich after the 2012 events.

“He’s a liberal,” Morrissey said. “But that’s in the context of the church. Cupich upholds doctrine. After the Supreme Court gay marriage decision he told me he resisted calls from the local media to denounce it. He seemed disappointed about other bishops around the country who did so. I view him as trying to bring civility to the public square, affirming faith across the aisle, if you will.”

A native of Omaha, Cupich studied philosophy at University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. in 1971, followed by higher studies in theology at the Gregorian University in Rome, and Catholic University in Washington, DC.

He was ordained a priest in 1978. In the early 1980s, Cupich worked in the apostolic nunciature, or Vatican embassy, in Washington, DC, as a secretary to Archbishop Pio Laghi, the nuncio, or papal envoy. One of Cupich's colleagues was Father Thomas P. Doyle, the canon lawyer who worked for Laghi, but lost his position after trying to force the bishops to confront the burgeoning clergy sex abuse crisis in 1985.

Doyle, who has since became an expert witness testifying against the church in victims' lawsuits, has had no contact with Cupich in nearly three decades. "I think he's many cuts above most of the bishops who've been appointed in recent years," Doyle said. "He's a vast improvement over [Cardinal] Francis George."

Cupich became a bishop in 1998. He served in Rapid City, Iowa, until his move to Spokane in 2010.

“In our conversations he talked a lot about the pressing need for immigration reform,” says Morrissey.

Washington state has an estimated 230,000 undocumented immigrants which puts it in the top 10 states that rely on such a foreign work force.

“They harvest our produce and crops,” wrote Cupich in a Sept. 19, 2013 diocesan letter, “Immigration Reform.” He continued:

They clean our hotel rooms and serve food in our restaurants. They care for our children, tend our lawns, and take on the manual labor we are unable or unwilling to do for ourselves. But they also are professionals — lawyers, physicians, technicians, priests, Sisters, mechanics, builders — and even soldiers serving our country.

As he denounced the “suffering caused by a broken immigration system,” Cupich cited parochial school scholarships and church social services to Hispanic children. He scored the “unequal enforcement of laws, the break-up of families, and the exploitation of laborers — in abuse at the hands of ruthless smugglers and, tragically, in thousands of deaths in the deserts of the American Southwest.”

Sensing that Cupich was more expansive than most bishops, Morrissey invited him to lunch after the 2012 election with several of his law faculty colleagues, women who had left the church.

“Cupich is very bright, very curious and engaging, but he wasn’t telling me that I could get ordained next week, either,” recalls Professor of Law Mary Pat Treuthart, one of the women at the lunch.

She left the church “because of women’s issues and not necessarily reproductive freedom — but restriction from full participation in terms of freedom.”

“I will always consider myself culturally a Catholic,” Treuthart said. “My memories and family history and frankly the values I bring forward into the world are based on Catholic principles.”

The lunch went off well “for people along a continuum of different issues,” she said. “He’s definitely a man of God, but he’s familiar on multiple levels with the world and how Catholic teaching may effect a given issue. He couldn’t have been more open to our feedback and input. He was all the things you’d want in a spiritual leader.”

Treuthart does legal work against the death penalty, a position embraced by bishops in the “seamless garment” ethos that sees capital punishment on a moral continuum with abortion and euthanasia.

She points out a loophole in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, with paragraph 2267 stating: “Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.”

Capital punishment is conducted by hanging or chemical injection in Washington.

“We’re constantly told by Catholic legislators that the church does not have a position against death penalty,” says Treuthart.

“Cupich is strongly opposed and has taken public positions in the community, giving presentations. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops focuses its campaign against the death penalty on Pope John Paul II's Gospel of Life encyclical, the concept of a Seamless Garment of Life, and the Fifth Commandment, 'Thou Shall Not Kill.’ If Catholic teaching were unequivocal on this point, then I assume many more Catholics would be against capital punishment,” she continued.

“It’s maybe 50 percent right now. The toughest presentations that I have done were in parishes here where most of the attendees support the death penalty.”

Cupich’s lunch with the law professors ended amiably, by several accounts, although the women were not pining for a return to the flock as the parties went their ways.

With Cupich unavailable for comment, it is unclear whether the encounter had a lasting impression on him.

But several months later he gave a lecture in Australia at the University of Melbourne, “Untying Some Knots: Talking About Faith to a Skeptical World in a Secular Age,” in which he said:

We have to address head-on the issue of the role of women in the church. But it would be a very great mistake to reduce the whole issue of women to the question of ordination. The church must engage the larger issue of women and begin by listening to women themselves….

Large numbers of women are well educated and hold positions of great responsibility in society and in government. The church must seriously recognize what a destructive effect on the family and on society it will be if increasing numbers of women are drifting away from communion with the Catholic Church, which many of them love but which many of them feel does not care about them. 

“The cultural warrior approach,” Cupich continued, referring to the rise of secularism, “brings little results other than giving us a temporary feeling of self-satisfaction. But even more so, it is not the way of the Gospel.”

On the other overarching issue that confronts the church, clergy sex abuse, Cupich stands in a different posture than Cardinal George.

George clashed with the National Review Board, twelve prominent Catholics appointed by the bishops in 2002 to help them dig out of the abuse crisis. The group included Leon Panetta, Washington attorney Robert Bennett, Illinois Supreme Justice Anne Burke, and Duquesne Law School Dean Nicholas Cafardi.

In Chicago the group attended Mass with George, after which, over coffee and donuts he fumed, “You will be the death of the church,” according to Panetta, Cafardi and Burke in interviews at the time.

George later became mired in a scandal when he reassigned an accused priest, who was subsequently arrested for child abuse. The archdiocese settled with the victims out of court. Abashed, George apologized.

Cupich has faced a different version of the crisis. In 2004, the Spokane diocese under Bishop William Skylstad used Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in response to a wave of abuse lawsuits. The diocese emerged from bankruptcy, paying $48 million to 180 plaintiff victims.

After becoming Spokane’s bishop in 2010, Cupich faced an escalation of new lawsuits, over abuses dating back many years. “Bishop Cupich had his back up against the wall. The diocese had no money and was facing a default,” Seattle attorney Tim Kosnoff, who represented the largest number of victims, told National Catholic Reporter.

Kosnoff called Cupich “shockingly candid with me and this was trust-building. Cupich is a thinking man and a credible negotiating partner.”

As Cupich resolved some of the lawsuits, he faced a tide of others, and made a move no other bishop has done in the long string of diocesan bankruptcies: he broke with Paine Hamblen, the law firm that had represented his predecessor — and then sued them for malpractice, alleging that the 2004 agreement did not provide for suitable reserves to guard against future abuse claims.

The diocese now faces 80 cases, according to the Spokesman-Review. “Our sole, laser focus from an ethical standpoint was the Catholic Bishop of Spokane,” one of the Paine Hamblin lawyers said in a deposition quoted by reporter John Stucke of the newspaper. “We crawled over broken glass to help that client survive.”

The lawsuit is schedule for trial in February, by which time Cupich will be several months into his tenure as archbishop of Chicago.

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Jason Berry, a GroundTruth correspondent for GlobalPost, was co-author of the recent FRONTLINE documentary “Secrets of the Vatican,” and author of Render unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church.