Pope Leo XIV was leaving the papal villa near Rome at the end of September. He faced a gaggle of cameras and microphones, per usual. “Can I ask you a question in English?” a reporter from the American Catholic news agency EWTN asked him. “One question in English,” the relatively new Bishop of Rome granted.

“I just wanted to ask one thing that has become a bit of a divisive subject in the U.S. right now, with Cardinal Cupich giving an award to Sen. Durbin,” EWTN reporter Valentina Di Donato said. “Some people of faith are having a hard time with understanding this because he is pro, or rather, he is for legalized abortion. How would you help people of faith right now decipher that, feel about that? And how do you feel about that?”

Leo began with a quiet “heh” to himself. If involuntary, it was nervous laughter. If intentional, he likely realized what a nettlesome question this was.

“I’m not terribly familiar with the particular case,” the pontiff said, but he soldiered on anyway, calling it “very important to look at the overall work that a senator has done during, if I’m not mistaken, 40 years of service in the United States Senate.” 

The pope’s off-the-cuff answer was within spitting distance of Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) actual tenure in Congress. He spent 14 years in the House and will have spent an additional 30 years in the Senate by the time he leaves office in early 2027. Durbin announced his impending retirement in April.

Chicago Archbishop and Cardinal Blase Cupich was going to honor Durbin’s long time in office with a lifetime achievement award from the diocese’s Office of Human Dignity and Solidarity, to be awarded in November. This announcement drew considerable opposition from American Catholics because of Durbin’s posture on a number of issues.

Ten fellow American bishops weighed in against the award. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights agitated against it as well. “The reason is simple: There has never been an abortion he couldn’t justify,” Catholic League President Bill Donohue wrote in a general call for Catholics to bring pressure to bear on Durbin to forgo the honor.

Though Durbin was elected to Congress in 1982 as a pro-life Democrat, he quickly flipped on the issue. Durbin has defended what he calls “Roe v. Wade thinking” for most of his time in Congress and all of his years in the Senate.

Donohue added that Durbin’s “voting record on other matters is also in opposition to core Catholic teachings,” and separately listed Durbin’s support of same-sex marriage and his “probing of the religious convictions of Catholic nominees for the federal bench” as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee as among those “other matters.”

For instance, Durbin — who, let’s remember, is Catholic — asked future Supreme Court Justice

© Washington Examiner