Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich has been a painful disappointment for pro-lifers. A long-time ally of the since-defrocked abuser, Theodore McCarrick, Cupich has been, at best, a reluctant defender of the unborn. Although he did hail the demise of Roe v. Wade as an opportunity for “a national conversation on protecting human life in the womb,” he criticized a statement made by his brother bishops on the occasion of President Biden’s inauguration—one which stressed the unique evils of abortion—as “ill-considered.” Illinois’s senior senator, Dick Durbin, on the other hand, is downright infamous. An unapologetic abortion extremist, his voting record includes opposition to laws that would end brutal and grotesque practices that can hardly even be mentioned in polite society—laws like the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. So, when it was announced that Cardinal Cupich planned to bestow a lifetime achievement award on Senator Durbin, the outrage that followed was swift, fierce, and completely justified. It was also quickly quelled; as the furor reached a fever pitch, Durbin wisely declined to accept an honour for which he was so obviously unsuited.

If only the matter had ended with that. Unfortunately, Pope Leo XIV inserted himself into the midst of this controversy to the great dismay of Catholics and pro-lifers across the globe. Although he prefaced his comments by saying he was “not terribly familiar with the particular case,” he nevertheless muddied the waters in a way which caused pain and confusion for all the sincere defenders of the unborn, many of whom have spent decades in the campaign to end prenatal infanticide. The Pope, despite his already acknowledged unfamiliarity with the specifics of the case in question, went on to offer that “someone who says I’m against abortion but says ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro‑life,” adding, for good measure, similar considerations regarding the “inhuman treatment of immigrants.”

The Pope, however, is wrong. Abortion is, quite simply, not like those other moral and social issues; only euthanasia rises to the same level of gravity because it, too, involves the liquidation of the innocent. The execution of criminals and the treatment of migrants are, of course, serious issues. But the tendentious assertion that one’s position on these could in any way qualify one’s claim to being “fully pro-life” is simply indefensible. Nor, of course, could any so-called humanitarian, no matter how sincere and effective, be described as pro-life while advocating for—and, in Senator Durbin’s case, actively and forcefully advancing—barbaric practices like partial-birth abortion and the infanticide of those lucky children who survive a botched abortion.

Because of his outspoken commitment to issues related to climate change, Pope Francis was, in his day, described by some commentators as the de facto head of the global Left. Although he maintained the unambiguous teachings of the Catholic Church regarding abortion, Pope Francis so often allowed that message to be crowded out by a media who preferred to amplify the issues that they found more congenial. We hope that this early misstep by Pope Leo teaches him an important lesson: the talking points of left-wing cable news commentators, who regularly draw false equivalences between other moral issues and abortion, have no place in the mouth of a pontiff of the Catholic Church. As the scandal—and media firestorm—that followed his remarks make clear, the world hangs on the words of a Pope: he has a grave responsibility, as St Paul writes to Timothy, to “preach the word,” to “be earnest in season, out of season” and to “convict, rebuke, exhort, in all long-suffering and teaching” (2 Tim 4:2).