Archbishop Cupich NOT attending Dominican University dissident conference?

Apparently, Joan Chittister, Jamie Manson, and Archbishop Cupich will not be having a get-together to “sing a new church into being.”

A month ago came some eyebrow-raising news that not only was the Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters’ Dominican University near Chicago to host a National Catholic Reporter dissident conference “New Faces, New Voices, New Ways of Being Church,” Archbishop Blaise Cupich himself was to be part of the festivities, celebrating Mass just after Sister Joan Chittister’s talk (at least according to conference organizers). Say what? The archbishop?!

Sister Joan was the one who wrote the foreword for one of the late Sr. Kaye Ashe’s radical feminist books, in which Joan is keen on the possibility of building “another church in the shell of the old one” (a seeming allusion to Karl Marx)… “it’s a new church whether anyone wants it to be or not.” Indeed, proposals such as “women’s ordination” which she has aggressively championed break the communion of the Church. Joan loves the shell of Catholic stuff like the Rule of St Benedict and the liturgical year, but she wants the core to be a different church, and she is an activist toward that end. If you want to know what the Sinsinawa Dominicans think about the Church, read my articles on their thoughts about the Eucharist and on their “relationship with the institutional church”.

Well, I notice today that the Dominican University website as well as the National Catholic Reporter website no longer mention Archbishop Cupich in relation to this event. I’d avoided making any assumptions about the significance of Cupich being involved with this affair, and I conclude that I was right to do so.

Here’s a screencap of what the conference page said before, if you look at the bottom of the text Cupich is mentioned, and further down the page where the schedule was listed (not shown in the screencap), he had been slated to celebrate the Eucharist.

The Dominican University website USED TO say Archbishop Cupich was involved with the conference and expected to celebrate Mass at its conclusion.

I wonder what happened, exactly.

Did the Archbishop agree to say Mass at Dominican University on that day without knowing what he was getting himself into, and back out when he found out what this really was? Did he never actually commit to it in the first place, but his name was exploited by the organizers? Who knows.

The thing is: it does seem like Archbishop Cupich, reputed to be hand-picked for Chicago by Pope Francis, is  very comfortable with working with progressives and might go as far as he could to “accompany” the folks at Dominican University and even the National Catholic Reporter people. But those looking for him to out-Bernardin Bernardin might, hopefully, be disappointed.