It is no coincidence that Pope Francis is launching his North American pilgrimage in Cuba, said Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich. The pope wants this trip to serve as a reminder of America’s immigrant history and a challenge to this nation, Cupich said.
“Refugees come to this country as they have from the very beginning,” Cupich said, during an exclusive interview with the Tribune. By retracing the journey of many Cuban immigrants, the pope is challenging Americans “to recall our own heritage.”
“I would think, whatever he says, that symbolic action will say a great deal,” Cupich said.
Cupich and Francis, two churchmen both relatively new to their leadership roles, have proclaimed similar missions of welcoming the stranger. Since the day Cupich first met his Chicago flock, he called for changes to the nation’s current immigration policy — making it clear it would be his No. 1 civic priority.
Cupich is seizing the opportunity of the pope’s presence on American soil to emphasize this mission.
On Thursday, Cupich shared a slogan with Chicago’s labor unions that he hopes will become the theme of his tenure. Borrowing from one of his predecessors, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who defined the church’s opposition to abortion, capital punishment, assisted suicide, and euthanasia as “a consistent ethic of life,” Cupich proposed “a consistent ethic of solidarity.” He said he’s not only channeling Bernardin, but Pope Francis as well.
“What I have done is pick up on another word … which broadens it a little bit and makes it a bit more dynamic in a sense, in that it does take a participation of people, a sense of belonging to one another,” he explained during the interview.
“It’s not just that we have life — breathing — as a consistent ethic by which we’re going to rally around and uphold together, but it’s the solidarity that we build with one another,” he added. “That’s something I wanted to highlight as a contribution the pope is making. I refashioned what Cardinal Bernardin said with that lens of the pope.”
In his speech to the Chicago Federation of Labor on Thursday, Cupich said his theme reflects how he prefers to define “the Chicago way” — the expectation that business, government and labor unions will always come to the table to work out a universally acceptable solution.
“In the church, we call that solidarity, a word I know is very familiar to union members,” Cupich told the federation.
“I want the church to become an even more committed partner in this civic solidarity, joining with business, government and labor in promoting the common good, especially in protecting the lives and dignity of those who are too often left behind in our city, nation and world,” he said.
Cupich expects Francis to deliver a similar challenge to the nation’s leaders when he arrives next week. On his first day in Washington he will meet with President Barack Obama at the White House, and then lead America’s Roman Catholic bishops, including Cupich, in prayer at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. He also will celebrate the first canonization Mass on U.S. soil at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The Blessed Junipero Serra, a Spanish-born Franciscan friar known for starting nine Spanish missions in California in the 1700s, is being elevated to sainthood.
On the second day, Francis will perform another papal first by addressing a joint session of Congress. That speech, as well as his talk on the White House lawn, will be two of four addresses he will deliver in English. In light of the Syrian refugee crisis and the impasse on Capitol Hill regarding immigration reform, the pope is expected to hammer home the importance of welcoming immigrants.
Cupich and his Washington allies hope the pope’s words won’t fall on deaf ears but will propel lawmakers to take action.
“We have no precedent for a papal intervention in Congress,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who has appeared publicly with Cupich to build support and apply pressure on the House of Representatives to call for a vote on comprehensive immigration reform.
“I also can’t think of a time when we’ve had a pope with this kind of global following,” Durbin said. “As for whether the pope can make a difference, this is new territory for the American government to invite in a pope for the first time and to see what kind of impact he will have.”
Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, said because Francis is always addressing the universal church, he won’t tailor his message too much but will be mindful of his American audience.
“He’s almost certainly going to call on American ideals, the idea of America as a nation of immigrants,” she said. “This is in our national story. He’s going to challenge Americans to live up to those ideals in reality when it comes to issues of immigration.”
Cummings said Francis is fulfilling a promise made by Benedict XVI to attend the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia. But the urban northeast no longer reflects the face of the church, she said. The town hall meetings broadcast on national television a few weeks ago were a better indication of where the pope would have gone if he had crafted his own itinerary, she said. In those meetings, Francis met via satellite with homeless people in a Los Angeles shelter, immigrants in a parish on the Texas-Mexico border and Catholic schoolchildren in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood.
Cupich pointed out that each town hall took place in a setting that had empowered people on the margins.
“It’s a nod to that effort … that we don’t buy into a throwaway culture, nor do we leave people at the margins and forget about them,” he said.
Even if the pope isn’t coming to Chicago, that isn’t stopping Chicagoans from going to him. Reyna Wences, 24, of the Little Village neighborhood, is one of seven Chicagoans joining 100 immigrant women walking from a detention center in Philadelphia to Washington in time for the pope’s arrival. Wences hopes Francis takes notice of their pilgrimage and calls for an end to detention and deportations of immigrants.
“We’re reminding ourselves there are people who walk through the desert for a better life,” said Wences, who crossed the border from Mexico 15 years ago crammed “like a sardine” lying in the bed of a truck. “We hope the pope will pay attention and intervene. It’s all about dignity as human beings.”
The Rev. Marco Mercado, a Chicago priest, also will travel to Washington. He will be one of several Illinois nuns and clergy seated in the gallery of the Capitol to hear the pope’s address to Congress. Mercado is trying to keep his expectations in check.
“The only way you can change the hearts and minds of politicians is through the vote,” he said. Still, he hopes Francis awakens lawmakers to what has made America such a superpower.
“We have to be the country that has made America so great … a merciful, open, welcoming, hardworking country and not a country of fear … so we build walls and distrust people,” Mercado said. “We know what we want and we fight for it and we trust. In God we trust.”
Miguel Diaz, former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See and now a professor at Loyola University Chicago, will travel with his wife, Marian, to greet the pope at the White House.
Diaz, a Cuban-American, doesn’t rule out the possibility of a return papal trip to the U.S. that would include Chicago, noting that the ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic diversity of the Chicago church reflects the face of American Catholicism.
“I have no doubt that if this had been able to be orchestrated in some way, that may have been realized,” Diaz said. “Who knows? We may still bring him back in the future.”
Cupich doesn’t rule out the possibility either. But he admits he hasn’t extended an invitation.
Bringing a popular pope to the Windy City can’t be a unilateral decision, he said. It would require a consensus from a broad base of ecumenical, government, labor and business leaders. After all, according to Cupich, that’s the Chicago way.
“With this pope anything is realistic,” Cupich said. “We surely would welcome him back to this country.”
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