How I wish for a clear-teaching pope

Pope Leo blesses a big chunk of ice for “climate change” awareness. Vatican Media/EPA

Update: I was heartened to see this from Pope Leo today (Oct. 7, 2025) when asked about Trump sending the National Guard to the pope’s own hometown of Chicago. He said he prefers not to comment on political choices made within the United States. I am guessing he was not pleased with the responses to his previous statements and is being more careful. Praise God. We all learn and grow, and I pray that is what is happening here.

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When I read Pope Leo’s off-the-cuff comments about the Senator Dick Durbin controversy (Cardinal Cupich was set to honor the vociferous, notorious pro-abortion senator with a “lifetime achievement award” before Durbin declined), my heart sank. The pope conflated abortion—the intrinsic evil of child murder—with capital punishment and immigration policy, both of which are issues of prudential judgement, not intrinsic evil. There is no longer any doubt that the theological confusion and blurred lines of morality from the previous pontificate will continue in the new one, and, as has been the case for too long now, the opportunity to save souls diminishes.

Years ago, as a terribly catechized cradle Catholic (like most of my generation), I almost left the Catholic faith for a “Bible church.” Thanks to my mother’s words and through subsequent self-study, I was introduced to the consistency and crisp clarity of Catholicism, taught plainly and beautifully for century upon century, and I returned to the Church in complete awe. We must remember that the universal Church of the ages was left to us by Our Lord, and she is meant to be a lighthouse in the storm, a beacon of Truth and clarity for souls lost in the fog. The Church is the clarion call, dispersing the noise of the world. She is the beam of light that slices cleanly through the darkness, confusion, and disordered thinking, revealing the folly and nonsense of a culture in chaos, and lighting the narrow path to Christ Jesus.

Yet, in recent years, rather than confronting and banishing the fog and confusion all around us, too many voices in the Church have become almost indistinguishable from the siren call of the world that leads souls to destruction.

Now, to be sure, the current worldliness and lack of clarity coming from the hierarchy is no indication that the Church herself has changed or even blurred her teaching, because the Truth can never be altered, reversed, or contradicted. The Truth is the Truth, the moral law is the moral law, and no pope can change what God has created and decreed.

Which brings us to Pope Leo’s unfortunate words. I am no scholar on the issue of capital punishment and Church teaching (though others such as Dr. Edward Feser certainly are, and I refer you to Feser’s longer and shorter works on the subject). But I can assure you that the basic principles and teachings of our Faith are knowable and accessible even to us layfolk, i.e., the uncredentialed peasants in the pews.

For example, it does not require a theology degree to distinguish between issues of intrinsic evil versus issues of prudential judgement. Intrinsic evils are those acts which, of their very nature, are always immoral and may never be permitted. Abortion is intrinsically evil because it is murder, i.e., the targeted and direct killing of an innocent human being. There has never been a time when the Church permitted even a single abortion—not even when the question of ensoulment was debated. It is important to note that not all killing is murder (we are permitted to kill an intruder in self-defense or kill an enemy combatant in a just war, for example), but murder (which abortion is) is always immoral. Basic Christian moral reasoning (Morality 101) holds that we may not murder a single person even if it means we will save a million others, or the whole world, by doing so. Intrinsic evil is a black-and-white issue.

By contrast, the death penalty has never been considered murder nor intrinsically evil—not over the course of two millennia of Catholicism. In fact, it has always been morally permissible. For the 20 centuries of the Church’s existence, the recourse to capital punishment has been defended as a legitimate option by popes, saints, Fathers and Doctors of the Church, not only for safety/defense reasons, but for reasons of justice and deterrence. In my own lifetime, upon my reversion in the 1990s, I read in the Catechism that recourse to capital punishment was rightly reserved to the nation-state, and this had always been so. Individual Catholics could, in good conscience, agree or disagree with the death penalty or debate its proper application, but never could we declare—on our own and connected to nothing that came before—that the death penalty is inherently immoral. Precisely because it has always been understood and taught as morally permissible in some or many cases, the entire subject falls under the category of prudential judgement, and Catholics are legitimately allowed to have differing opinions on the subject. Something that has never been intrinsically evil cannot suddenly become so.

So for Pope Leo to casually state that it is "not really pro-life" to be against abortion but okay with capital punishment flies in the face of unbroken Catholic understanding and tradition. In his letter, “Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion,” Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) wrote the following in 2004 while head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the congregation in charge of protecting doctrinal purity:

“Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion…For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment…he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about…applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion…. (emphasis mine)

Unfortunately, the past decades have seen the blurring of moral lines and specifically the corruption of the term “pro-life” by those who wish to lump all issues under that banner, usually in order to dilute and weaken the anti-abortion position. Some call this the “seamless garment” argument, but I refer to it as the "kitchen sink-ing" of the pro-life movement. This subversive trick seeks to throw “everything but the kitchen sink” under the "pro-life" umbrella so that everything that even touches on the human experience—from healthcare, to gun regulation, to “women’s and LGBTQ rights,” to immigration, welfare and environmental policies, and alllllll the prudential justice issues—are lumped together without distinction and used as a bludgeon against those who are specifically focusing and fighting against mass child murder in the form of abortion. During Covid crazy, even questioning the mask insanity or the untested vax would get one labeled as “not pro-life”!

The shaming via “kitchen sink-ing” and conflation of issues is the point. That way, if someone who is opposed to abortion (child-murder) doesn't agree to each leftist or secular political policy or talking point, he is accused of not being sufficiently "pro-life" but only "pro-birth." And too many faithful Catholics who still want the leftists to like us spend our energy trying to prove that we really are “pro-life”! Most of you will recognize that this tactic has been used even by “progressive” Catholics for decades now.

I’m to the point where I agree with Peter D. Williams who said on X:

I am once again imploring everyone to drop the fairly stupid term, ‘pro-life’. It’s unbelievably bad (because misleading, and easily subverted) rhetoric. Simply own being ‘anti-abortion’ as one would have no problem being ‘anti-slavery’, ‘anti-FGM’, etc.

I am sorry to say that there is more to lament about Pope Leo’s statement than just the implication that our saints, popes, Fathers, and Doctors are “not really pro-life.” There is the added confusion of the straw man thrown in, inexplicably, regarding the treatment of illegal immigrants in America. The pope implies that some Catholics (those who did not want to see Durbin honored because of his child-murdering record) may be “in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States.” First, the statement assumes that there is “inhuman treatment” of deportees by federal agents—a massive assumption that deserves a whole other article to dissect, but which is not a forgone conclusion by any means (media spin and Democrat narrative notwithstanding). And second, no Catholic is “in agreement” with “inhuman treatment” of anyone. That is a bizarre supposition and frankly, a smear to the faithful in America. It’s painful to read, as it harkens back to the habitual insults to the flock by the previous pope—to which a loving father should not subject his children.

The clear and direct answer to the (softball) question posed by the reporter should have been an easy one for Pope Leo: “No Catholic politician who spends a lifetime championing and enshrining human abortion may legitimately receive a public honor from the Church; this is scandal. Rescind the offer.”

Instead, we got obfuscation, the conflation of intrinsic evil and prudential judgement issues, straw men, and insinuation.

I will not say that all my hope for this papacy is gone (we must never lose hope!), but the hope I had for clarity and truth to return to the Holy See under Leo is fading fast. Therefore, I return to the reading of the martyrs, saints, Fathers, and Doctors of the ages, and I keep my peace.

And we all should keep our peace, because while souls will indeed be lost by bad or neglectful leadership (and frankly the Catechism tells us the dire truth about the Church’s final trial in paragraphs 675-677), we have the promises of Christ to keep us steady. There is no earthly explanation for why the Catholic Church still stands after two millennia when all other merely human institutions have fallen, other than the fact that the God-Man Jesus Christ keeps His Word:

“And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” -- Matthew 16:18