KEY POINTS
• The Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco ordered priests in the archdiocese to deny House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the sacrament of communion because of the California Democrat’s support for abortion rights.
• Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s move comes as the Supreme Court is expected within weeks to overturn the constitutional right to abortion embodied in the 49-year-old court decision Roe v. Wade.
• The Roman Catholic Church opposes abortion, considering it a “grave sin.”
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi is barred from receiving Holy Communion due to her support of legalized abortion, announced San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone on Friday.
Cordileone wrote a public letter to Pelosi informing her not to show up for Holy Communion at Mass. If the California Democrat does present herself, priests will not give her communion, explained Cordileone.
“A Catholic legislator who supports procured abortion, after knowing the teaching of the Church, commits a manifestly grave sin which is a cause of most serious scandal to others,” Cordileone wrote. “Therefore, universal Church law provides that such persons ‘are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.'”
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said in an open letter addressed to Pelosi and in another directed toward the faithful that “Pelosi’s position on abortion has become only more extreme over the years, especially in the last few months.”
Pelosi’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The archbishop’s decision comes after the leak earlier this month of a draft Supreme Court opinion indicating the top court would strike down the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
Cordileone said Pelosi had not responded to his requests to meet in the months since she pledged to codify abortion protections in federal law after lawmakers in conservative states passed near total-bans on abortions at the state level.
The archbishop said he sent Pelosi a private letter in April, warning that he would bar her from communion unless she publicly repudiated her support for abortion rights or stopped referring to her Catholic faith in public.
In a letter to priests in the archdiocese Friday, Cordileone wrote, “There are those who speak of such actions as I am taking as ‘weaponizing’ the Eucharist.”
“However, this is simply application of Church teaching. One would have to demonstrate that a person’s actions in following Church teaching is explicitly for a political purpose in order to justify the accusation of ‘weaponizing’ the Eucharist,” Cordileone wrote.
“I have been very clear all along, in both my words and my actions, that my motive is pastoral, not political,” he added.
Pelosi said last month that the controversy over her support for abortion rights “really gets me burned up in case you didn’t notice, because again I’m very Catholic, devout, practicing, all of that. They would like to throw me out. But I’m not going because I don’t want to make their day.”
We have always emphasized the importance of having a good website for your company because it can act as your best tool for marketing and sales. A poorly designed website can repulse people from your business and can cause you to lose customers before you even have them. Get in touch with HyperEffects to work on creating, enhancing, and making the website of your company more user-friendly.