Archbishop Cardinal Francis George Dies
By Margaret Paulson in News on Apr 17, 2015 9:30PM
Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop Emeritus of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, died Friday morning after a near decade-long battle with cancer.
His successor, Archbishop Blase Cupich, issued a statement calling George “a man of great courage who overcame many obstacles to become a priest,” one of them being polio as a child. Cupich noted that Cardinal George did not seek a comfortable position after being ordained but instead joined the Oblates of Mary Immaculate where he traveled around the world as a missionary.
Cardinal George was a born-and-raised Chicagoan, having grown up on the Northwest Side and attended St. Pascal School in Portage Park, then briefly Quigley Preparatory Seminary before attending St. Henry Preparatory Seminary in Belleville, Illinois. He traveled around the world before being appointed by Pope John Paul II as the eighth Archbishop of Chicago in April 1997 after Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s death. He was the first native Chicagoan to hold the position. In 2005 and again in 2013, he was one of a handful of American Cardinals participating in the Papal Conclave to choose Pope John Paul II’s successor and then Pope Benedict XVI’s successor.
While he was esteemed in the Catholic establishment as a pious, dedicated, intelligent and compassionate man, Cardinal George was viewed with a more skeptical eye by those outside the church. In recent years, Cardinal George had become an outspoken voice of church conservatives, butting heads with Pope Francis through his column in Catholic New World, the newspaper for the Archdiocese of Chicago.
In his often disjointed column, he clung to the idea that Catholics are being persecuted for their beliefs on gay marriage and contraceptive use, all the while making unfounded statements on both. For example, he proclaimed that “same-sex marriage is not a civil rights issue” because sexuality is different from race and marriage between a man and woman is “a moral good,” and he compared the use of contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancy to cheating on exams:
“But even if contraceptives were used by a majority of couples only and exclusively to suppress a possible pregnancy, behavior doesn’t determine morality. If it can be shown that a majority of Catholic students cheat on their exams, it is still wrong to cheat on exams.”
Cardinal George was openly anti-gay, comparing the Chicago Pride Parade to the KKK and even fretting over Pope Francis’ kindness toward gay people, who, he said, are "demand[ing] acceptance rather than asking for forgiveness."
Cardinal George also came under question regarding the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. As highlighted by a particular case in the Chicago Diocese, Cardinal George at best was willfully ignorant and at worst, covering up sex abuse. Many thought the Cardinal could have done much more to bring guilty priests to justice.