Cardinal Blase Cupich defended the Archdiocese of Chicago’s decision to present its Nostra Aetate Award to billionaire businessman Michael Sacks, a major donor to abortion causes and the Planned Parenthood abortion business.

Sacks will receive the award at an October 29 fundraiser for the formation of future Catholic priests, framing the criticism in terms of interreligious respect and the risk of antisemitism.

The award is scheduled for the annual Seminary Salutes Rerum Novarum banquet at IBEW Local 134 in Chicago. The event, organized with the University of Saint Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary, raises funds for priestly formation. Cupich and seminary rector the Very Rev. John Kartje are listed as hosts.

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Sacks, chairman and CEO of GCM Grosvenor, has provided approximately $1.1 million in documented and reported support for abortion-related causes since 2020, according to Illinois Right to Life.

Public foundation records show $500,000 from the Sacks Family Foundation to Planned Parenthood of Illinois between 2020 and 2022.

A September 2026 Crain’s Chicago Business report identified an additional $600,000 contribution by Sacks to an abortion initiative that benefited Planned Parenthood of Illinois and the Chicago Abortion Fund. Sacks has also supported Personal PAC, which works to elect candidates who favor abortion, and helped recruit Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

In a statement issued Monday, Cupich said the Nostra Aetate Award affirms the Church’s relationship with non-Christian communities, particularly Judaism, which is “uniquely linked at its roots to Catholicism.”

He described Jews as “representatives of a faith community bound to God by an irrevocable covenant” and said honoring Sacks acknowledges “shared divine heritage, distinct from specific contemporary political or doctrinal disputes.”

Cupich addressed criticism that a Catholic institution would honor someone who does not hold core Catholic beliefs, “primary among them being the divinity of Jesus Christ.”

He wrote that Nostra Aetate supports public respect and dialogue even when individuals hold theological, moral or political positions at odds with Catholic teaching, without implying endorsement of those positions. He added that refusing to honor Jews “solely because they hold conflicting religious or political positions can risk mimicking historic patterns of antisemitism through exclusion and bigotry.”

His statements ignore the main reason for the opposition – namely that Sacks has funded killing babies in abortions and that the Catholic Church should not honor someone who violates its pro-life teachings.

Giving an award to an ardent abortion activist is not necessary to open dialog and conversation.

Illinois Right to Life had called on Cupich and Kartje to withdraw the honor. The group said in an earlier statement that the Archdiocese “cannot credibly proclaim the sanctity of human life while publicly honoring a man whose wealth has helped support abortion providers and organizations working to expand abortion in Chicago.”

After Cupich’s statement, Illinois Right to Life President and CEO Mary Kate Zander said the cardinal responded by suggesting that opposition was motivated by the donor’s Jewish faith.

“Our history of opposing Catholic awards to pro-abortion individuals stands by itself,” she said. “We believe abortion grossly violates the human rights of mother and child and are disappointed that Cardinal Cupich is intentionally misdirecting from the core tenet of our statement: The Catholic Church, which has always stood against abortion, should never honor anyone who has so publicly promoted the killing of innocent life. Michael Sacks’ Jewish roots are completely irrelevant.”

She told LifeNews: “This is not about Michael Sacks’ religion. It is about the lives of unborn children and the responsibility of Catholic institutions to uphold the dignity of every human being.”

The controversy follows last year’s episode in which Cupich planned to honor Sen. Dick Durbin, a longtime supporter of abortion, at another archdiocesan fundraiser. Durbin declined the award after objections from other bishops.

Illinois Right to Life is organizing a public protest outside the fundraiser:

WHAT: A peaceful protest outside the Rerum Novarum fundraiser
WHEN: Thursday, October 29, 2026 starting at 4:00 PM
WHERE: IBEW Local 134 Building – 2722 S. Martin Luther King Dr. Chicago, IL

ACTION: Request that the honor be withdrawn. Contact the Archdiocese of Chicago main office at 312-534-8200. Email: archchicago@archchicago.org

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The Oct. 23 survey of likely voters underrepresents 2024 Trump voters by 7%, suggesting opposition is even stronger than the numbers indicate.

Campaign officials said the results show Idahoans have not been persuaded by over $6 million in false claims that the initiative is “common-sense” and would merely restore abortion law to the Roe v. Wade standard. The fake ads also claim pro-life laws are driving doctors from Idaho or that women can’t get care for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. None of that is true.

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In fact, Proposition 1 radically changes the definition of fetal viability in a way that would permit abortions later in pregnancy, and it overrides Idaho’s parental consent requirements so underage girls could obtain abortions without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

“No wonder Prop 1 is losing so badly,” said Mary Strow, communications director for the Stop Prop 1 campaign in an email to LifeNews. “The people behind it – many of them out-of-state leftists whose values are diametrically opposed to Idaho’s – chose to write Prop 1 as an extreme abortion measure. And Idahoans see right through their attempts to sell it as ‘moderate.’ It’s radical on abortion and it’s wrong for Idaho.”

The poll aligns with opposition from Idaho physicians.

Seventy-nine doctors signed a letter warning that the measure would legalize abortions up to birth by redefining viability so that a baby needing neonatal care such as oxygen or NICU support is no longer considered viable, eliminate parental notice and consent for minors including girls as young as 11 or 12, and allow non-physicians to perform abortions.

Idaho’s current law protects babies from abortions starting at conception. Proposition 1 would create a fake right to kill babies.

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I have also seen the way that the United States Catholic bishops respond to the Trump Administration, and it’s sad. Consider the “Public Apology” that Archbishop Grob of Milwaukee just issued, following upon the opportunity he had to pray with the President in the Oval Office, and the statement of Bishop William Joensen of Des Moines, Iowa about the same event, saying the Administration “exploited our meeting for partisan political purpose.”

It reminds me of the truly baffling response of then-Archbishop of Washington Wilton Gregory after the visit President Trump made to the St. John Paul II National Shrine in DC in June, 2020. The Archbishop said the institution “allow[ed] itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated.”

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It also reminds me of a moment I had together with several very good Catholic priests as we sat together a few years ago for breakfast at a conservative political conference, and at a certain point they began expressing a concern that they might be getting “used” or “exploited” for political purposes.

In Catholic circles, we call this “rash judgment.”

There is no evidence whatsoever that any of these events or gatherings were anything other than public expressions of prayer and devotion that belong to the very fabric of America, as well as public expressions of a commitment to policies that implement the Gospel.

For decades, policies of the Democrat Party as well as court decisions guided by the now obsolete precedent of the “Lemon test” (prohibiting “excessive entanglement” of religious institutions with the state) have led us far away from what our Founders established in this land of religious freedom.

Today’s Court, today’s President, and today’s Republican Party are bringing us back to the authentic understanding and practice of religious freedom.

Is that one of “the president’s policies” that Archbishop Grob said in his statement had “harmed” the people he heard complaints from about his White House visit? What other Trump policies does the Archbishop think we should be concerned about? Might it be President Trump’s actions to increase the freedom of students to pray in public schools, of pastors to speak freely from the pulpit, or of parents to have the financial help to send their students to a Catholic or other private school?

Maybe the Archbishop is concerned about the people who “had been harmed” by President Trump’s current success of bringing crime and murder rates to record low levels, or bringing poverty to a record low level, or having more Americans working now than ever, or raising the median household income higher than it has ever been, or lowering drug-related deaths by record numbers, just to name a few.

I’d invite the bishops – and everyone else – to check out the comparison piece I recently created showing the historic record of accomplishments that President Trump and the Republicans have achieved for the common good, as opposed to the radical and destructive policies of the Democrats.

In the light of the incredible successes that have flooded America and the world in just these last two years thanks to the Trump Administration and the tens of millions of Americans who voted it into office because they wanted these successes, our religious leaders should be PROUD to publicly associate themselves with this President and his Party.

Proud.

Not paranoid.

There is nothing to “apologize” for.

The behavior and words of Archbishop Grob and those who agree with him are yet another symptom of a bigger problem I outlined in my book Abolishing Abortion (2015, Thomas Nelson publishers), namely, that the Catholic hierarchy in America have been seriously misguided, and are seriously misguiding the faithful, regarding the extent to which the institutional Church is supposed to be “neutral” in matters of politics.

My book outlines numerous diocesan memos warning priests not to “discredit” any candidate, party or position they may take.

Excuse me, but how do you preach the Gospel in the light of such advice, especially when we have a political party that promotes unlimited abortion, the redefinition of marriage, the multiplication of genders and the suppression of religious freedom, not to mention its current enabling of terrorism, anti-Semitism, and socialism?

Some pastors don’t want to be political, because they “just want to preach the Gospel.”

It’s time to wake up to the fact that unless we exercise our freedom to get involved in politics, we will lose our freedom to preach the Gospel.

Nobody in American politics has protected and promoted that freedom more than President Trump and the Republican Party. It’s time to both recognize and celebrate that fact. And that’s nothing to apologize for.

LifeNews.com Note:  Frank Pavone is the national director for Priests for Life.

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This month, Colombia has rejoined the Geneva Consensus Declaration, from which the government of former leftist guerrilla Gustavo Petro had withdrawn the country in 2022.

On October 8, the Foreign Ministry announced the signing of the accession agreement, which took place at the headquarters of Colombia’s Mission to the Organization of American States (OAS), led by Ambassador Alejandro Ordóñez Maldonado.

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The United States currently holds the Secretariat of the Declaration, having taken over the role from Hungary.

In its statement, the South American nation’s Foreign Ministry emphasized that the Declaration “reaffirms that there is no international right to abortion, nor any international obligation for States to fund or facilitate it.”

Colombia had previously joined the declaration in May 2022 under the presidency of Iván Duque, with Ordóñez also serving as ambassador to the OAS. Petro withdrew the country from the coalition on August 22 of that same year — just two weeks after taking office — according to the Spanish newspaper Evangélico Digital.

The Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family was launched in 2020 at the initiative of the United States. It was signed on October 22 of that year, with culturally diverse nations such as Brazil, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, and Uganda serving as regional co-founders.

The signatories undertake four commitments: to improve the health of women and girls; to affirm that there is no international right to abortion; to strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society; and to defend each nation’s sovereignty in setting its own health policy.

The text further reaffirms equal rights for men and women, calls for comprehensive health care during pregnancy and childbirth, and establishes that abortion should not be promoted as a method of family planning and that its regulation is a matter for each country to decide.

A growing coalition of countries from five continents, representing approximately two billion people, has rallied around these principles.

Colombia’s accession comes at a time when the signatory countries are seeking to take the next step. Diplomats, lawmakers, and pro-life activists gathered in New York at the Global Forum for Life, Family, and Freedoms to establish the first pro-life “Core Group” at the United Nations. The Geneva Consensus Declaration serves as the foundation for this initiative.

During the Forum — which coincided with the U.N. General Assembly — participants agreed to create a Convening Committee to design a coordination mechanism between governments and to seek official recognition for the Core Group within multilateral bodies.

With Colombia joining this effort, the chances of success increase.

Although the nation’s foreign minister stated that adhering to the Declaration does not alter Colombian legislation or the jurisprudence of its high courts, it does represent a political and diplomatic commitment.

The new Colombian president, Abelardo de la Espriella, aims for a foreign policy aligned with the Trump administration that strengthens alliances in international forums based on Christian principles. At the same time, this push on the foreign front to defend the right to life and the family is mirrored by a corresponding effort on the domestic front. In a conversation with the author of this article, David Cote — a Representative to the Chamber for Bogotá for the 2026?”2030 term — stated that one of Colombia’s major challenges is confronting the “demographic winter.”

“Fewer and fewer children are being born, and this will have profound social, economic, and cultural consequences in the coming decades,” said the politician from the Democratic Center party. “Therefore, it is necessary to promote public policies that strengthen the family and create favorable conditions for motherhood and child-rearing.”

In that same vein, Cote highlighted the challenge of addressing the phenomenon of commercial surrogacy.

“Those of us who champion a pro-life agenda will continue to promote legal reforms and legal debates regarding the regulation of abortion in Colombia,” the politician noted. “The protection of life must be strengthened, and — within democratic and institutional frameworks — it is legitimate to pursue legislative, constitutional, or jurisprudential changes aligned with that conviction.”

LifeNews Note: Yoe Suárez is The Washington Stand’s international affairs correspondent. He is an exiled journalist, writer, and producer who investigated in Havana about torture, political police, gangs, government black lists, and cybersurveillance. A graduate of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, he was a CBN correspondent, and has written for outlets like The Hill and Newsweek. He has appeared on Vox, Univision, and Deutsche Welle as an analyst on Cuba, security, and U.S. foreign policy. This column originally appeared at Washington Stand.

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While Malthusians may celebrate, the more prudent will have reason to lament this decline. A falling population does not automatically mean more food for everyone. Rather, it means fewer workers producing, fewer researchers inventing, fewer households living. When the population shrinks, colleges close, neighborhoods empty out, businesses are bankrupt. The bonds holding society together begin to shrivel up, and a smaller population staggers under the infrastructure and social safety net designed for a larger one.

For a time, policymakers can evade the consequences of a below-replacement birth rate by encouraging immigration. But incoming immigrants — even if they could be assimilated — do not change the fact that the birth rate is too low, nor that it is still falling. People who emigrate from the most culturally similar countries (such as most of Europe) hail from places with their own birth rate problem.

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Policymakers (at least conservative ones) have recognized falling fertility rates as a crisis for some time, and officials like Viktor Orban in Hungary or J.D. Vance in the United States have proposed ways to address it. Usually, government officials try to encourage family formation through pro-natalist policies with an economic aspect: tax credits or some similar incentive.

Unfortunately, such efforts to reshape economic incentives for families have not borne the hoped-for fruit. In Hungary, the country that has implemented the most aggressive pro-natalist measures, the total fertility rate did increase slightly, from 1.23 children per woman in 2011 to 1.61 in 2021. But now it is sliding again, plunging all the way to 1.39 by 2024.

Encouraging families to have more children is easier said than done, and a recent survey by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) suggests the most important factors are cultural, not financial. “People talk a lot about affordability as a driver of family formation, and it is,” allowed Dr. Lyman Stone, IFS senior fellow and co-author of the report. “Kids are expensive. I’ve got four. They cost something.”

“But, if you look in New York City, the ultraorthodox Jewish population there has six kids each, and their hipster neighbors have 1.6 or less,” Stone said on “Washington Watch.” “That’s not because they’re living in a different economy. That is because of cultural differences.”

IFS and the Wheatley Institute surveyed 10,000 people from more than a dozen countries, seeking to test various cultural factors across a variety of cultural contexts.

One clear indicator of the important role culture played was the number of children celebrities had in different countries. “If they had bigger families, those people wanted bigger families.” Stone explained. “What all this adds up to is basically to say that advertising works. … If you advertise the good family … it trickles down to regular people debating whether now is the right time to have a kid.”

For example, in Israel and Egypt, “the typical admired celebrities have more than 2.5 children,” and the fertility rates are 2.86 and 2.33, respectively. In Japan and South Korea, the average admired celebrity has one child and 1.7 children, and the fertility rates are 1.14 and 0.99.

But culture includes far more than celebrities; religion is a major factor (hence the root “cult-”). Here, the IFS researchers met with a minor surprise. “We came into this thinking that religion would be a very important variable, and it was pretty important. We did find that religious people wanted more kids, had more kids, and tended more kids,” summarized Stone. “But the effect size wasn’t quite as big as we thought.” Indeed, “the top third of respondents in religiosity” only had an average fertility rate 9% higher than the other two-thirds.

Far more significant was the effect of community support — and specifically moral support rather than physical support. “We found that people were actually very sensitive to the opinions of their social peers,” Stone suggested. “People who thought that their friends were going to celebrate a new baby, if they had one, were about 20% likelier to say that they were intending to have another child. … In fact, a lot of material aid, things like meal trains or showing up to help babysit a child, are actually less important than that kind of moral support.”

When people thought their parents would celebrate a new grandchild, that statistic increased to 30%. One of the biggest factors was just parents who were willing to talk to their adult children to encourage them, ‘Hey, we hope … you give us grandkids. We’d love to share that part of life with you.’ That was associated with a significant difference in desired family size and intentions to have more beyond that.”

It was this moral support from friends and family that accounted for religious people having more kids, Stone concluded. “We found that religious communities create dense networks of people who care about each other’s families, and that’s what it is about religion that really boosts fertility,” he said. “Religious people had more friends. Their friends were more supportive of them having additional kids. Their friends were willing to do more to help them.”

By contrast, he said, how often a pastor talked about the importance of family was not a significant predictor of the number of children a person had. “It’s not about specific pastoral leadership, which I think is a bit of a surprise to us,” Stone said. “And, I’ll be honest, a bit of a disappointment — because that would have been easier to change. Whereas coming in and saying, ‘Well, everybody at church just needs to be a little bit better friends with each other,’ is much harder.”

Here, difficult does not mean impossible. Jesus not only commanded but expected the church to be a close-knit community of love and support. “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). And what Jesus commands, he empowers his followers to obey by the Holy Spirit. It may be messy; it may take work. But Christians who truly believe in Jesus’s words can see their church community grow.

“Policymakers often focus on the finances of fertility, but our work shows they may need to focus on the friends, the family, and the famous people just as much,” Stone told The Washington Stand. “People have the families their societies tell them are good to have.” The church should have the clearest and most positive message on the family.

LifeNews Note: Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand, contributing both news and commentary from a biblical worldview. Originally published by The Washington Stand.

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There are roughly 250 million Americans eligible to vote. Yet in the 2022 midterm elections, fewer than half participated. Think about that. In a nation where government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, millions chose not to make their voices heard. And Christians are not exempt from this troubling pattern. Even where churchgoers vote at higher rates than the general population, far too many remain on the sidelines.

As Americans, we have a right to vote. As Christians, we also have a responsibility to be faithful citizens.

Remember Jesus’s words, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). In our constitutional republic, citizenship carries responsibilities. Our government was not designed for spectators. It depends on the participation of the people. Jesus also called his followers the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Salt that never touches the food cannot preserve it. Light hidden from view cannot illuminate the darkness. We’re called to make a difference, not withdraw from the world around us. Voting is simply one practical way to fulfill that calling.

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Our freedoms were not secured so that we could stand aside while others decide how they will be used. The ballot is not the whole of faithful citizenship, but it is one of the clearest opportunities we have to act on our convictions.

In the late 1940s, the Reverend Peter Marshall, chaplain of the United States Senate, preached a sermon entitled “Trial by Fire,” drawing from Elijah’s challenge in I Kings: “If the Lord is God, follow him. But if Baal, follow him.” Marshall warned against living in a moral fog, refusing to choose between conviction and compromise. Then he declared, “I, for one, am tired of hearing about our rights and privileges as American citizens. The time has come. It is now when we ought to hear about the duties and responsibilities of our citizenship.”

Those words are as relevant today as when he spoke them. Because every election is about more than which party wins or who occupies an office. It’s about the principles that will shape our laws, protect our freedoms, and influence the lives of our children and grandchildren. When we stay home, we don’t stop those decisions from being made. We simply leave them to someone else.

So ask yourself: if people who share your convictions remain silent, whose values will shape America’s future? We cannot demand responsible government while neglecting our responsibility as citizens. Exercise your right. Fulfill your responsibility. Study the candidates, weigh the issues against biblical values, and then vote.

LifeNews Note: Tony Perkins is the president of the Family Research Council.

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