House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) hit back against the archdiocese of her home city, San Francisco, for placing a ban on her receiving Holy Communion last week.
Chiding the archbishop for his position on the LGBTQ community and foisting his beliefs about abortion on to others, Pelosi pointed out that many Catholic dioceses have not taken similarly punitive measures against politicians who promote the death penalty, which also violates core Catholic teachings.
“I wonder about the death penalty, which I’m opposed to. So is the church, but they take no actions against people who may not share their view,” Pelosi said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday. “We just have to be prayerful. We have to be respectful. I come from a largely pro-life, Italian American, Catholic family, so I respect people’s views about that. But I don’t respect us foisting it on to others.”
BARRED IN SAN FRANCISCO, NANCY PELOSI FINDS OPEN DOOR, RECEIVES COMMUNION IN DC
Last Friday, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco barred the House speaker from receiving Holy Communion if she did not publicly renounce her position on the contentious topic. The speaker also apparently suggested that overturning the Roe v. Wade precedent was not consistent with religious teachings in the Gospel of Matthew, which calls for helping the disadvantaged in order to “enter the kingdom of heaven.”
“Our archbishop has been vehemently against LGBTQ rights, too. In fact, he led the way in some of the initiatives — an initiative on the ballot in California,” she said, a possible reference to Cordileone’s support of California’s Proposition 8. “So, this decision taking us to privacy and precedent is very dangerous in the lives of so many of the American people and not consistent with the Gospel of Matthew.”
Abortion was thrust to the political fore after a leaked draft decision from the Supreme Court earlier this month signaled the court will overturn a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, established in Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
“This is not just about terminating a pregnancy. So the same people are against contraception, family planning, in vitro fertilization — it’s a blanket thing, and they use abortion as the frontman for it, while they try to undo so much,” Pelosi argued in the interview. “I think it’s very insulting to women to have their own decision hampered by politics. This should never have been politicized.”
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She notably shifted her language on abortion from using the words “choice” to “decision” in keeping with recommendations from the House Pro-Choice Caucus, correcting herself at times.
Over the weekend, Pelosi received the Eucharist at a Catholic church in Washington, D.C., the archbishop of which told the Washington Examiner he does not plan to impose a ban similar to the one in San Francisco.
Here’s a video from @holytrinitydc showing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi receiving communion from a Eucharistic minister -not the priest- at mass on Sunday. She’s wearing an orange blazer in the right line. pic.twitter.com/4WnChU7KGj
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) May 24, 2022
Holy Communion is an important sacrament in the Catholic religion and takes place during weekly Masses.
