In 2023, Bishop Prevost spoke in Spanish at a Catholic University in Peru after receiving an honorary doctorate. Here are two extremely important paragraphs, originally translated from the Spanish to English here:
These reflections particularly concern issues related to the value of human life. Last week, Cardinal Blase Cupichdelivered another address at Fordham University in New York, marking the 40th anniversary of Cardinal Bernardin’s original speech. Cardinal Bernardin, deeply concerned about how abortion and other social justice issues had come to divide certain sectors within the Church, offered an important response rooted firmly in Church doctrine. From this teaching, he proposed looking outward, towards society, within a framework he called a “consistent ethic of life.”Cardinal Bernardin continued developing this idea up until his death.
“Bernardin’s vision suggested understanding the Church’s moral teachings as responding holistically to the many challenges affecting human life, as if they were threads woven into a single garment. This perspective outlines a path for the Church, one which remains relevant today. For instance, a Catholic cannot truly claim to be ‘pro-life’ by maintaining a stance against abortion while simultaneously advocating in favor of the death penalty. Such a position would lack coherence with Catholic social teaching. Our thinking and teaching must manifest coherence, consistently defending the value of human life from its beginning to its natural end.” (bold mine.)
There’s a few things to notice here. First, all three Chicagoans, Cardinal Bernadin (top left) and Bishop Prevost (middle) and Cardinal Cupich (top-right) all promoted the “Seamless Garment” theology of bioethics, also called “the consistent ethic of life.” This is not merely my suspicion or a conspiracy theory. You can hear that Prevost literally promotes “Bernadin” and “Cupich” and “consistent ethic of life” in the above two links and quotes with those exact words in bold.
Secondly, we have to delve into the very meaning of Seamless Garment or “Consistent Ethic of Life.” The most conservative defenders of the “Consistent Ethic of Life” insist that pro-lifers must defend life from conception to natural death. Theoretically, that’s not a bad idea. However, that is not its philosophical source, nor is it the practical outcome. We will now consider the hippy source and the intended-outcome of Seamless Garment bioethics.
Eileen Egan
Although the late Cardinal Bernadin often gets credit for the Seamless Garment, it actually comes from a Catholic pacifist named Eileen Egan (above) who coined the term in 1971. Wikipedia quotes her: “The protection of life is a seamless garment. You can’t protect some life and not others.” Again, we find nothing too offensive in those words. But the very next line in Wikipedia admits Egan’s real intention: “Her words were meant to challenge members of society who divided their commitment to protecting and cherishing human life, choosing anti-war stances but not anti-abortion work, or those members of the anti-abortion movement who were in favor of capital punishment.”
The key words above are “dividing their commitment.” It seems like every time I tried to start a pro-life club at my Jesuit High School in the early 1990s, I was told by staff we had to “divide the time” between stopping the death penalty and stopping abortion. Similarly, every time we tried to start a pro-life club at my Jesuit University in the late 1990s, staff members insisted that we divide our time between anti-death-penalty speakers and anti-abortion speakers.
The fact is that this strategy stopped us every time. Every time an older “advisor” who held to The Seamless Garment or Consistent Ethic of Life got involved in a pro-life movement, we young people came to a mysterious halt in praying in front of abortion centers or working for Crisis Pregnancy Centers or having post-abortive speakers come to promiscuous Universities. Some may say this is anecdotal, but ask any Gen Xer who is pro-life who went to a Catholic High School or Catholic University and they will all tell you the same thing: Seamless Garment philosophers always sunk the pro-life movement. It was never overt. Rather, it was always sneaky.
p/c Chicago Tribune
Cardinal Bernadin of Chicago used a similar Seamless Garment theology to curtail the pro-life movement across Illinois beginning in the 1980s. It then spread across the country by the 1990s. Respect Life offices in many chanceries of liberal dioceses were told by their bishops that they had to “divide their commitments” between euthanasia, abortion and the death penalty. But then, everyone spent so much time figuring out the percentage of how to “divide the commitments” that nothing got done on any of those fronts. (See my last article as to why this work shouldn’t be applied to the death penalty at all.)
The reason I call today’s article The “Seamless Garment” is Quiet Propaganda for Abortion is because that philosophy has been used to stop the pro-life movement among Catholics in the United States since leftist Cardinal Bernadin started to promote it beginning in 1983.
However, it didn’t simply die in the 1980s or 1990s in Chicago. Chicago has remained the epicenter of confusing pro-life Catholics to this day. A quick search on AI produces this: “In 2023, Cardinal Blase Cupich participated in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Fall General Assembly, which addressed the topics of immigration and abortion. A key point of discussion for Cupich was the emphasis on how both immigration and abortion fit into a consistent ‘pro-life’ ethic and that no single issue should be prioritized above others.”
But all this is theoretical. What does the Seamless Garment look like practically? Here are two breathtaking examples: 1) Cupich was bishop of Spokane from 2010 to 2014. Catholic World Report described his attitude to the pro-life movement there by stating this: “Cupich discouraged priests and seminarians from participating and the diocesan newspaper stopped allowing 40 Days for Life to run advertisements.” 2) Now in 2025, Cupich of Chicago tries to honor the pro-abort Democratic Senator Dick Durbin with a “lifetime achievement award.” Shockingly, Leo then verbally honored Durbin. (Durbin quickly declined the award for strategic reasons.)
Also, keep in mind that Bishop Prevost promoted Cardinal Cupich’s destructive views in the video linked in the first paragraph of this article.
The above man in white was also a big fan of the Seamless Garment or Consistent Ethic of Life. Above is one of his three happy meetings with Italian abortion pioneer, Emma Bonino. If you don’t believe me, search her name and you will see that the old pro-abort has had a carte blanche invitation to the Vatican over the last decade. And no, it’s not to bring her there to convert her after bringing abortion all across Italy. It’s because the Seamless Garment is the most surreptitious way to be pro-abortion. In fact, I got the above picture from Vatican News, so not even the official Vatican outlets are ashamed at their current promotion of abortion superstars.
Of course, nothing changed following the 2025 “Conclave.” One of the first articles I wrote after that was titled Rearranging the “Pontifical Academy For Life.” I began the article by stating: “In 2016, Archbishop Paglia (top left) was named the ‘President of Pontifical Academy for Life’ by Francis. Despite the pious names, both were in favor of contraception and assisted suicide. Now in summer of 2025, real Catholics were thrilled to find out that Leo would replace Paglia with someone else. However, the excitement was short-lived as he replaced him with Monsignor Renzo Pegoraro (top right) who also promotes these pro-death dogmas. Ed Pentin at CNA even reports that Pegoraro ‘was the longtime deputy of its outgoing president.'”
All in all, we see that those who promote the seamless garment seem to have plausible deniability at first, precisely because “consistent ethic of life” sounds Catholic. But all the above examples prove these men are not just “weak on abortion,” but truly pro-abortion and fully pro-euthanasia.
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