Cardinal Cupich’s opening prayer for Democratic National Convention failed to address the obvious

Cardinal Blase Cupich delivered the invocation prayer at the opening of the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago. It received mixed reviews from US Catholics.

The cardinal’s prayer addressed the importance of unity and national responsibility, as well as of “advancing human dignity and liberty”. The prayer, however, did not directly address abortion and so-called reproductive rights, despite those issues being directly addressed by speakers at the convention and a core plank of the Democratic Party platform.

The party’s position on various issues such as abortion, artificial reproductive technology and gender ideology go against key moral teachings of the Catholic Church, and the Democratic convention has put abortion, especially, front and centre in terms of significance and relevance.

It also follows President Joe Biden having presided over the “most aggressive anti-Catholic administration ever known” in US history, according to US-based Herald contributor Ken Craycraft. And Biden’s vice president who has served that same administration, Kamala Harris, will formally accept the Democratic presidential nomination for this November’s election by the end of the DNC.

“We pray that you help us to truly understand and answer the sacred call of citizenship,” Cardinal Cupich said addressing the convention on 19 August. “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.”

He also called on Americans to “understand and answer the sacred call of citizenship” and to “confront our failures to root out ongoing injustices in our national life, especially those created by moral blindness and fear of the other”.

Outside the convention centre, pro-abortion activists paraded around dressed up as Mifepristone abortion pills. Planned Parenthood sent a “mobile health centre” to park near the convention to provide free vasectomies and “medication abortions”, reports the New York Times.

While there is nothing presently to indicate the DNC organisers coordinated with Planned Parenthood, the presence of the van, as the New York Times put it, “underscores the way this convention, more than any other, is going to be a head-on display of a new, unbridled abortion politics”.

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“They’re degrading human life and women for that matter, it’s just absolutely disgusting, this continued celebration of abortion,” Democrats For Life of America executive director Kristen Day told Fox News Digital regarding the pro-abortion atmosphere and events around the DNC.

The day before Cardinal Cupich appeared at the convention, Planned Parenthood posted on X that all its free vasectomy and medication abortions slots had been “filled”, and to “check back soon”; it was reported that 10 “medication” abortions were carried out in the space of a day.

Hence some Catholics were unimpressed with Cupich not being more direct as he gave his invocation prayer. Disappointed Catholics took to social media to vent their frustrations:

“Thinking about [Cupich’s] DNC ‘prayer’, it is upsetting but remember, he’s not a leader inspiring a new generation of faithful Catholics,” remarked one individual going by the account name “A Milwaukee Catholic” on X. “He’s the face of a dim, bygone era of decline, a symbol of closed churches after the 1960s. The youth & zeal are on the side of tradition.”

The post was accompanied by a picture of Harrison Butker alongside Cardinal Raymond Burke.

Butker, the Kansas City Chiefs’ kicker, recently weighed in on the Last Supper controversy at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, when a parody of the Last Supper was performed with drag queens and LGBT individuals representing Christ and the Apostles. Butker took to social media to quote Galatians 6:7-8 and its striking line: “God is not mocked.”

He also recently stood firm on the value of motherhood in the face of media pressure that continues to come his way following a commencement speech he made at a small Catholic college in May, in which he discussed women considering embracing motherhood over pursuing a career, after which the mainstream media did the sort of collective pile-on that wouldn’t have been out of place on an American football field.

Cardinal Raymond Burke was one of the highest-ranking Catholic Church officials to address the “abominable mockery” of the Last Supper parody during the opening ceremony in Paris, and which he described as a “Theatre of Satan”.

Cardinal Cupich was one of Pope Francis’ big appointments in the US Catholic hierarchy. He has gone on to establish himself as one of the country’s most liberal senior prelates, while also attracting significant criticism from more conservative members of the US Catholic Church.

The full text of Cardinal Cupich’s invocation prayer at the Democratic National Convention can be read here:

We praise you, O God of all creation. Quicken in us a resolve to protect your handiwork. You are the source of every blessing that graces our lives and our nation.

We pray that you help us to truly understand and answer the sacred call of citizenship. 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.

In every generation, we are called to renew these aspirations, to re-weave the fabric of America. We do so when we live out the virtues that dwell in our hearts, but also when we confront our failures to root out ongoing injustices in our national life, especially those created by moral blindness and fear of the other.

We pray for peace, especially for people suffering the senselessness of war. But as we pray, we must also act, for building up the common good takes work. It takes love.

And so we pray: May our nation become more fully a builder of peace in our wounded world with the courage to imagine and pursue a loving future together. And may we as individual Americans become more fully the instruments of God’s peace.

Guide us, Lord, in taking up our responsibility to forge this new chapter of our nation’s history. Let it be rooted in the recognition that for us, as for every generation, unity triumphing over division is what advances human dignity and liberty.

Let it be propelled by the women and men elected to serve in public life, who know that service is the mark of true leadership.

And let 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.

We ask all of this, trusting in your ever provident care for us. AMEN

RELATED: Cupich: ‘Counterproductive’ to deny Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians

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Photo: Archbishop of Chicago Cardinal Blase Joseph Cupich offers the invocation prayer during the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, USA, 19 August 2024. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

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