Last week San Francisco Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone announced that he would ban House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from receiving Holy Communion. Now, some liberals are up in arms about it.
In his notification to Speaker Pelosi, the Archbishop reminded her about “…the Church’s ancient and consistent teaching that from the first moment of conception life must be guarded with the greatest care while abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes.” It is fairly common knowledge, even amongst non-Catholics, that the Catholic church is against abortion.
And yet, some liberals, like CNN’s Jim Sciutto, claim the Archbishop is being political. He Tweeted: “12 years of Catholic school, altar boy, family deeply involved in our church, and never saw anyone banned from receiving communion. This is a deep fissure in the church – and a position Pope Francis himself doesn’t support.”
While it is accurate to say that Pope Francis does not support denying communion to a politician who supports abortion rights, he also says this: “accepting abortion ‘is a bit as if daily murder was accepted,'” reported America, the Jesuit Review. The Pope added, “Whoever commits an abortion, murders. Take any book on embryology, those books on medicine. At the third week of conception, many times before a mother even realizes it, all the organs are there. All of them, even their DNA. It is a human life. Period. And this human life must be respected. This principle is very clear.” Finally, Pope Francis said that anyone who does not understand that should ask whether it is “right to kill a human life to solve a problem.”
The Archbishop tried to reason with Pelosi, and to teach her what her faith instructs. It was she who cut him off, according to him, saying in his letter to her, “I am grateful to you for the time you have given me in the past to speak about these matters. Unfortunately, I have not received such an accommodation to my many requests to speak with you again since you vowed to codify the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in federal law following upon passage of Texas Senate Bill 8 last September.”
Listen to Archbishop Cordileone in his own words about why he banned Pelosi from communion:
Regarding who is being “political,” Red State reports: “When [John] Kerry ran for president in 2004, St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke ordered he be denied Communion when campaigning in the area. Republican New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was also told he should not take Communion because of his position on abortion by Edward Cardinal Egan.” It is not as if this hasn’t been done before.
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It is CNN’s Sciutto who is making this political, not Archbishop Cordileone. Cordileone is simply holding firm to his Church’s teachings. While Pope Francis may have a different take on how politicians who support what he calls “murder” should be handled by the Church, it appears that the Archbishop tried that route. Pelosi made the choice to continue to claim to be a Catholic while doubling down on her efforts to legalize abortion under Federal law, creating an end-around of the Supreme Court. Should she be allowed to receive communion?
