How in the World Does This Guy Get to be a BISHOP?

 

CNA Staff, Jan 20, 2021 / 05:04 pm MT (CNA).- Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, used Twitter to issue a scathing criticism of the USCCB’s official statement on the inauguration of President Joe Biden.

In his four-part Twitter thread on Wednesday, Cardinal Cupich said that “the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued an ill-considered statement on the day of President Biden’s inauguration. Aside from the fact that there is seemingly no precedent for doing so, the statement, critical of President Biden, came as a surprise to many bishops, who received it just hours before it was released.”

Three different bishops speaking on background to CNA said they were aware that Cardinal Cupich wanted a more supportive, clearly pro-Biden statement, and that he spent most of Wednesday trying to get the support of other bishops to come up with an alternative statement.

Cupich says he wats to encourage "dialogue". With whom, exactly? This guy...

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 19, 2021 / 11:00 am MT (CNA).- President-elect Joe Biden is expected to promptly roll back pro-life policies the Trump administration put in place, NBC News reported on Monday. 

Biden, who will become the second Roman Catholic president when he is sworn in to office on Jan. 20, is believed to be seeking to repeal the Trump administration’s Protect Life Rule and the expanded Mexico City Policy.

The Protect Life Rule prevents organizations which perform or refer for abortions from receiving Title X family planning funds. It effectively stripped Planned Parenthood of approximately $60 million annually in federal funding. 

The Mexico City Policy prohibits federal funding of international non-governmental organizations which promote abortion as a method of family planning.

Biden is also expected to address the contraceptive mandate, and he has previously pledged to repeal the Hyde Amendment and codify Roe v. Wade into law; the Hyde Amendment prohibits the use of federal funding for elective abortions in Medicaid. 

Why Is She Crying? Probably Because of Something YOU Did

CHICAGO, Illinois -- Some worshipers see a sign from God after a caretaker at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Chicago saw what looked like tears pouring from the Virgin Mary's eyes.

The caretaker noticed the shocking sight early Sunday morning, as she prepared for what could be one of the church's final services.

The church faces foreclosure and is due to go to bankruptcy court Tuesday morning. The community was in shock at the weeping icon.

"There's something she's trying to tell us, so we're just going to seal our lips and listen to what she has to say," said Father Nick Jonas.

Monday the residue of the oil-like substance streaming from the Virgin Mary's eyes remained, with many believing the oil has healing properties and that its origins are a blessing from God.

"I can't explain why she is tearing, but I do know as human beings we are usually crying for two reasons: either joy or sorrow," Fr. Jonas said.

I'm Looking at You,Bishop Cupich

READ THE WHOLE THING!



Up on the Rock of Cashel in Ireland, there is the ruin of a bishop’s stronghold. Someone once said to me there: “They always take care of themselves.” They were the bishops. At the time of the apostles, bishops were poor and lived risky lives. Yet with the Edict of Milan (313), bishops became state officials as well, controlling lands and towns and provinces. They gained civil dignities and stipends. They were barons and lords.
Nothing in the way they were originally constituted said that they ought to behave in this way. They went along with the culture instead of witnessing to it.  Not all bishops do this, but enough do to make their rate of consumption and longing for class a problem for the Church’s presence in the world.
Bishop’s residences can be a huge problem. Again, some live in modest houses, but for the rest, the houses are a massive counter-witness to the official work of the Church. The Church is a witnessing body. It is a series of corporations for legal purposes. More importantly, the Church is fundamentally a witness of Jesus Christ in the world. Which does not entail having lots of money or a higher social status.
Theologically, the problem is that the bishop is bound by the material parameters of Jesus Christ’s own life. It is simply not possible to witness credibly to Jesus Christ while living a life significantly richer than Jesus Christ – unless the message of the Church is a mere commodity. Living the life of Christ is personal in the sense that it engages the whole person, body and soul. Every aspect of the individual’s existence is supposed to manifest Christ. This applies to priests, too, but that is a subject for another time.
Armani suits or expensive hobbies demonstrate the individual bishop’s reliance on material things rather than his reliance on the Spirit. It could also suggest one’s imagined superiority over the people around or one’s fitting in with the upper class.

Over to You, Bishop Cupich!

 Washington D.C., Aug 4, 2019 / 02:46 pm (CNA).- U.S. bishops are calling for prayer and action in the wake of two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio this weekend. 

 “We encourage all Catholics to increased prayer and sacrifice for healing and the end of these shootings,” the bishops wrote in an Aug. 4 statement. “We encourage Catholics to pray and raise their voices for needed changes to our national policy and national culture as well.”

“The lives lost this weekend confront us with a terrible truth,” bishops wrote. “We can never again believe that mass shootings are an isolated exception.”

“They are an epidemic against life that we must, in justice, face.”

  From the dictionary:

Definition of epidemic (Entry 2 of 2)

1 : an outbreak of disease that spreads quickly and affects many individuals at the same time : an outbreak of epidemic disease

2 : an outbreak or product of sudden rapid spread, growth, or development an epidemic of bankruptcies

In Chicago, 1,517 people have been shot this year. That is 129 fewer than 2018.

He's Distancing Himself...How About DOING Something About it?

Chicago, Ill., May 11, 2019 / 02:20 pm (CNA).- Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago is distancing himself from the decision of a pastor who invited controversial preacher Louis Farrakhan to speak at his parish, saying that he was not consulted before Farrakhan’s talk.

“Antisemitic rhetoric — discriminatory invective of any kind — has no place in American public life, let alone in a Catholic church,” Cupich said in a May 10 statement.

Farrakhan, 86, is the founder of the Chicago-based group Nation of Islam and has a history of anti-Semitic preaching.

“I’m here to separate the good Jews from the satanic Jews,” Farrakhan said at one point during the talk.

Geez...what kind of pastor would do something that stupid? Let me think... OH YEAH! 

Fr. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Church, invited Farrakhan in response to Facebook’s decision May 2 to ban him from its platforms, due to Farrakhan’s violations of the site’s policies regarding “hate speech.” St. Sabina is a predominantly African American parish in Chicago’s South Side.

Blase Cupich Denies Allegations He Is Sane

From Eye of the Tiber, of course... 

Cardinal Blase Cupich responded to an anonymous letter earlier today accusing him of being sane.
“To say that I am sane is insane,” the American cardinal said. “Yes, I admit it. What sane person would say that protecting the environment is a more important issue than the allegations levelled at the Pope? Seriously, what else would I have had to say to convince you that I’m a complete crackpot? Would I have needed to say that those who are asking the Pope to speak about recent allegations that he knew about the McCarrick situation were only doing so because he is a Latino?”
Cupich went on to say that allegations of him not being a nutbag must be an inside joke by friends, saying that “this is the type of thing they would do.”
“Ah, they’re always breaking my balls, these guys. They know I’m a head case, most of you all know I’m one, but now people are asking my opinion as though I’m all of a sudden gonna say something coherent, but I’m not. I’m not going down the rabbit hole of sanity. Not at this age. I’m gonna stay focused on the environment—I’m gonna stay focused on the redwoods. My high school girlfriend was a redwood.”

Celebrating Life, Funeral Style

The family went to the press, who didn't bother to even read the text of the sermon as far as I can tell.

A funeral should focus on the way an individual lived, rather than the way he died, Jeff and Linda Hullibarger said.
That’s why they’re upset at the way a local priest, the Rev. Don LaCuesta at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Temperance, Mich., handled the service for their 18-year-old son, Maison, who died on Dec. 4. The couple said the priest disregarded their requests for an uplifting homily and instead chose to sermonize on the morality of suicide.
“He basically called our son a sinner, instead of rejoicing in his life,” Ms. Hullibarger said.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...

“Pope Francis stresses the merciful God and the forgiving God,” said the Rev. Charles Rubey, founder and director of Loving Outreach to Survivors of Suicide. The organization is a ministry under Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago that supports those who have lost loved ones to suicide. “For a priest to even hint that the person might not be in heaven is grossly wrong.”

 Must have learned that from Bishop Cupich.

You can read the entire text of the homily here:

http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/12/16/father.lacuesta.homily.maison.hullibarger.funeral.pdf

Bishop Cupich and the Elephant in the Room

September 19, 2018 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Chicago priest and his parishioners have burned a rainbow flag that was once displayed at the parish, in an act that the priest has called an “exorcism,” in apparent defiance of the Archdiocese of Chicago, led by pro-LGBT Cardinal Blase Cupich.

Although a spokeswoman for the archdiocese told the Windy City Times that “the pastor has agreed not to move forward with these activities,” after Fr. Paul Kalchik of Chicago’s Resurrection Parish said he would burn the flag publicly, the priest went ahead with the event in private, joined by several members of the parish. They reportedly prayed prayers of exorcism as well.

Kalchik told the Chicago Sun-Times that he was the victim of homosexual sex abuse by a neighbor as a child, and defended his actions as a response to homosexualist “propaganda” in the Catholic Church.

“That banner and what it stood for doesn’t belong to the Archdiocese or Cardinal Cupich. It belongs to the people of this parish who paid for it,” Kalchik told the newspaper. “What have we done wrong other than destroy a piece of propaganda that was used to put out a message other than what the church is about?”

“The people of this parish have been pretty resilient and put up with a lot of B.S.” Kalchik told the Sun-Times. “And it was just by accident that this banner that was made to celebrate all things gay … did not get destroyed when I first got here.”

It is not clear if the priest also burned donation pledge cards as he had planned to do, in likely response to corruption in the archdiocese revealed in recent scandals involving Cardinal Cupich.

The burning was carried out in “a private way, a quiet way, so as not to bring the ire of the gay community down upon this parish,” Kalchik told NBC News on Monday. “It’s our full right to destroy it, and we did so privately because the archdiocese was breathing on our back.”

Kalchik told NBC News that the flag was a “profane” symbol because it mixed the LGBT rainbow with a cross, and said that using the cross as anything other than a “reminder of our Lord’s passion and death . . . is what we consider a sacrilege.”

Pants on Fire

 During the Mass on the 21st Ordinary Sunday, I read a 4-page letter from the Pope that was kinda sorta about the current sexual abuse report from Pennsylvania. I have some personal disagreements with it, but he is still the Pope.

I would not, ever, read anything from Bishop Cupich from the sanctuary. I read the transcript of what he said.


 Cardinal Blase Cupich has instructed Chicago-area priests to deliver a statement at Mass this weekend slamming a local TV news report that he calls “misleading,” saying it was edited to suggest he and Pope Francis were downplaying the ongoing clergy sex abuse scandal.

Statement of Cardinal Blase J. Cupich on Misleading NBC Chicago Report August 29, 2018
An NBC Chicago TV report that aired Monday night was edited in such a way that gave the false impression that Pope Francis and I consider the protection of children to be less important than other issues, such as the environment or immigration. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A review of the unedited footage of that interview shows that I was referring to the recent letter by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, not the terrible crime of clergy sexual abuse. I said that it was not appropriate, or even possible for Pope Francis to respond to the letter’s many undocumented allegations, and I endorsed his request that journalists determine their veracity.
I was then asked whether there should be an independent investigation of the Archbishop Theodore McCarrick case, and I endorsed the call of Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, for a thorough investigation.
The edited report created the false impression that my comment that the pope should not “go down the rabbit hole” of the allegations in the Viganò letter was about sexual abuse. As the unedited footage shows, it was not.

They Don't Require Math in Journalism School

In 2018, the highly retrospective nature of most of the allegations still gets lost in the deserved and appropriate public wrath at each new wave of revelations. Those revelations are about sexual abuse that hundreds and perhaps thousands of priests in the United States committed over a long period but overwhelmingly in the 1960s through the 1980s. Gray notes that, in the John Jay report of 2004,

the most common decade of birth for alleged abusers was the 1930s and the most common decade of ordination was the 1960s. This profile has not changed in allegations that emerged in the 14 years that have followed — including the recent [Pennsylvania] grand jury report. No new wave of abuse has emerged in the United States.

“Wave,” of course, doesn’t mean “incidence.” CARA counts 22 cases of abuse that priests in the United States are alleged to have committed in 2015–17. That’s an average of about seven cases per year. Still too many. For perspective, however, compare that with the annual average of 271 cases of abuse that, since 2004 alone, has been alleged to have been committed by priests during the 1970s. Are the figures for the past few years so dramatically lower because accusers tend to come forward only many years after an incident? Will we have to wait until 2050 to have an adequate picture of what the rate of abuse might be now? Probably not, according to Gray...

SEVEN per year. Meanwhile in the Chicago Public School System....

They were top athletes and honor-roll students, children struggling to read and teenagers seeking guidance.
But then they became prey, among the many students raped or sexually abused during the last decade by trusted adults working in the Chicago Public Schools as district officials repeated obvious child-protection mistakes.

 To better quantify the frequency of abuse in Chicago’s schools, reporters obtained and analyzed Chicago police data on such crimes from 2008 through 2017. Police investigated 523 reports that children were sexually assaulted or abused inside city public schools during that 10-year period, or an average of one report each week, the data show.

 In all, the Tribune closely examined 108 cases and identified 72 school employees as alleged perpetrators in the last decade. The rest were student-on-student sexual attacks.


FYI -there are over 13,000 school districts in the United States.

Not Even a Bishop Can Be This Clueless...Can He?

In an NBC News interview yesterday, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago insisted that it was more than acceptable for Pope Francis to refuse to discuss Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s shocking testimony, which implicates a host of Catholic Church leaders — including the pope — in covering up sexual abuse and immorality.

“The pope has a bigger agenda,” Cupich told interviewer Mary Anne Ahern when asked about the pope’s refusal to discuss Viganò’s claims. “He’s got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the Church.”

“We’re not going to go down a rabbit hole on this,” Cupich added. A rabbit hole, indeed. If this was satire crafted by SNL writers to mock the Catholic hierarchy, it’s hard to imagine how the cardinal’s remarks would come across any worse.

I Guess Australia Is Too Far

Chicago, Ill., Jul 20, 2018 / 03:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Fr. C. Frank Phillips, former pastor of St. John Cantius Parish in Chicago, has been asked by his religious superior to move to St. Louis, the priest informed his supporters Wednesday.
Phillips, 68, has been accused of misconduct involving adult men. He was removed as pastor of St. John Cantius March 16, and prohibited from public ministry in the Archdiocese of Chicago by Cardinal Blase Cupich.

In 1998, Phillips founded the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius, with the approval of Cardinal Francis George of Chicago and of the Resurrectionists.
“From the founding of the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius, I have instructed the men how to live the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. One of those vows, obedience, may especially challenge Religious because it is difficult to submit your will to a superior,” Fr. Phillips wrote July 18 to Protect Our Priests, a group formed to support and assist him.
“As you know, the Canons are requested not to have contact with me, which is difficult for them and for me as their Founder. Also, I have been asked by my superior to relocate to St. Louis. I am requested to do this not under formal obedience but willingly in the virtue of obedience. Is this difficult? Yes, it is,” he wrote.

Dumb and Dumber

Chicago, Ill., Jul 9, 2018 / 02:12 pm (CNA).- Thousands of marchers joined Chicago priest Father Michael Pfleger to protest gun violence on Saturday, shutting down more than a mile of the city’s busiest highway.

Only a portion of Dan Ryan Expressway’s northbound lanes were expected to be closed by the demonstrations, but safety concerns caused police to shut down all the lanes. The priest was pleased with the move, expressing hope that stopping traffic would draw more attention to protestors’ calls for the city to do more to address gun violence.

“We came out here to do one thing: to shut it down,” Father Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabine Catholic Church, told the Chicago Tribune.

“We came here to get their attention. Hopefully we got their attention. … Today was the attention-getter, but now comes the action.”

How can this nut job still be a pastor, or a priest for that matter? Oh yeah...because his Bishop is Cupich.

Cardinal Cupich also expressed support for the protest. He issued a series of tweets on Saturday, pointing to the power of nonviolent demonstrations, and applauding Catholic involvement.

“Non-violent action and peaceful protest have the power to create change. The change we need in this moment is to end a culture of violence and indifference,” he wrote in a July 7 tweet.

“I applaud the courage shown by young people in our city and across the country demanding their right to life and human dignity, given by God and guaranteed by our nation’s founders.”

Thou Shalt Not Steal

Two security guards have been accused of stealing as much as $100,000 in cash collections from Holy Name Church in Chicago, according to reports.
Jarrell Patterson, 22, and Artemio Calderon, 25, were caught on video several times allegedly using a key to enter the church and unlocking a safe containing the dough, the Chicago Tribune Reported.

The two men worked for Monterrey Security, which handles security for the church, for the past six years.
They were charged Sunday with one felony count each of burglary, police said.. 
It’s believed they swiped between $88,000 and $100,000 in collections, though detectives are still working on determining the exact amount.
Red flags went up when an audit revealed that weekend collections were off, a church spokeswoman told the Tribune.
The church was expected to rake in about $40,000 a week — or $2 million a year — but was recording shortfalls of between $15 and $5,000, according to its website.

I found this article in the New York Post. It should read Holy Name CATHEDRAL.

 

Claretians in the News!

This is the main reason why we are expected to fast: to discipline our physical appetites in order to concentrate on the spiritual realm. Rather than being satiated and dull as the result of too much food and drink, fasting makes our senses sharper and we become more aware of the spiritual realm.

Yes, of course. But it also gives us a reason to call a press conference.

CHICAGO - A Chicago pastor who has been on a strict fast for weeks to show solidarity for DACA recipients and push for humane immigration laws, plans to take his protest to Washington March 4 and 5.

Father Gary Graf said he will march in front of the White House for 40 hours straight, from 9 a.m. (local Washington time) on March 4 through 5 p.m. on March 5.

It will be the priest’s final attempt to encourage Trump to extend DACA. As he marches he will hold placards illustrating the number of “Dreamers,” as DACA recipients are known, who are losing their status per day, 916, and per week, 6,412. By the end of March, he said, 25,648 will have lost DACA status.

At a news conference in Chicago Feb. 12, Graf joined dozens of priests and religious sisters and brothers who promised to fast at least one day a week throughout Lent in solidarity with young people who were brought to the United States without documents as children and now face the possibility of deportation from the only home many remember.

Well, it's nice to see a Claretian priest get a little face time.

Another Reason to Avoid Chicago

Denver, Colo., Feb 12, 2018 / 04:05 pm (CNA).- The Archbishop of Chicago has invited some U.S. bishops to a series of conferences on the 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. The seminars will be held at three Catholic colleges later this month.

According to a letter obtained by Catholic News Agency, the meetings, dubbed “New Momentum Conferences on Amoris Laetitia,” are designed to offer a “tailor-made program that goes from why Amoris Laetitia provides New Momentum for Moral Formation and Pastoral Practice to how to provide formative pastoral programs.”
“The aim is to gather fifteen to twenty Bishops to have a conversation with the aid of theologians on the related topics,” the letter said.
The letter, written by Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, explains that the conferences are modeled after a seminar of bishops and theologians discussing Amoris Laetitia held at Boston College (a Jesuit school) in October 2017.

Let's see who is presenting:


Several theologians and a canon lawyer will also present at the upcoming seminars.
Among the theologians is Dr. Kate Ward, a professor at Marquette University (a Jesuit school). From 2012-2015, Ward was a national board member of Call to Action, a group that has called for the ordination of women to the priesthood, expressed support for same-sex marriage, and said that the Church should re-evaluate its “position” on the use of artificial birth control.
From 2006-2009, Ward served as a national board member of Call to Action Next Generation, a youth affiliate of the organization. She chaired that board from 2008-2009.
In 2006, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, then-prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Bishops, wrote that Call to Action’s activities “are in contrast with the Catholic Faith due to views and positions held which are unacceptable from a doctrinal and disciplinary standpoint. Thus to be a Member of this Association or to support it, is irreconcilable with a coherent living of the Catholic faith.”
Also scheduled to present is Dr. Natalia Imperatori-Lee, a theologian at Manhattan College.
Imperatori-Lee was also a presenter at the October seminar at Boston College. At that seminar, she criticized the Church’s “infantilization of the laity,” saying that “lay people are infantilized by a logic...where pastors serve as gatekeepers, offering permission for sacraments, rather than as counselors who accompany laypersons on their sacramental journeys.”
In a 2015 interview with the podcast Daily Theology, Imperatori-Lee described the late theologian and University of Notre Dame (formerly a Catholic school)  professor Fr. Richard McBrien as a mentor. According to the National Catholic Reporter, “McBrien advocated the ordination of women priests, an end to mandatory celibacy for priests, moral approval of artificial birth control, and decentralization of power in the church.”

Or as a famous Jesuit once said, "Who am I To judge?"

During his Feb. 9 speech, Cardinal Cupich said that Pope Francis has introduced a set of “hermeneutical principles” – principles of theological interpretation – that “force a paradigm shift” in the Church’s work with families.
Among the aspects of such a paradigm shift, Cupich said, is “rejecting an authoritarian or paternalistic way of dealing with people that lays down the law, that pretends to have all the answers, or easy answers to complex problems, that suggests that general rules will seamlessly bring immediate clarity or that the teachings of our tradition can preemptively be applied to the particular challenges confronting couples and families.”

Cardinal Cupich Must Be Out of Town

Chicago, Ill., Jan 29, 2018 / 11:59 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Occasionally, the liturgical calendar has a curious intersection with secular holidays.
This year, Ash Wednesday—which begins the penitential season of Lent with a day of fasting, abstinence, and prayer—falls on Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day celebrates a third-century Christian martyr, but it has also become a celebration of romantic love, replete with with chocolates, fancy prix fixe menus, roses, and an overload of candy hearts.
The Archdiocese of Chicago has clarified that Lent is more important than candy hearts, and suggested that Catholics pick some other day for paper hearts and Cupid’s arrows.
 statement released by the Archdiocese explained that Catholics will not be dispensed from the laws of fasting and abstinence on Ash Wednesday, and suggested that Catholics planning to celebrate Valentine’s Day could do so on Feb. 13th, which is also Mardi Gras.

“The obligation of fast and abstinence must naturally be the priority in the Catholic community,” said the statement.
“Valentine’s Day can appropriately be celebrated the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday which also happens to be Mardi Gras, a traditionally festive time before beginning our Lenten observance.”