A spokesman for the archdiocese of Washington accidentally admitted to the Washington Examiner on Monday that it is ignoring press inquiries about pro-abortion House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The revelation raises questions about how D.C.’s Archbishop Wilton Gregory, named a cardinal in the Catholic Church by Pope Francis in 2020, will handle Pelosi’s apparent defiance of her pastor’s directive to abstain from communion due to her ongoing support for abortion.
On Friday, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone informed Pelosi: “you are not to present yourself for Holy Communion and, should you do so, you are not to be admitted to Holy Communion, until such time as you publicly repudiate your advocacy for the legitimacy of abortion and confess and receive absolution of this grave sin in the sacrament of Penance.”
Gregory has refrained from discussing the matter, though he previously said that he would not deny President Joe Biden communion, though Biden heads arguably the most pro-abortion administration in United States history.
The Archdiocese of Washington appears to have inadvertently sent an internal email to the Washington Examiner that stated: “just sharing for you to know what comes in. Email since Saturday, when I last checked the comms inbox has just been a couple of random people wanting to tell the Cardinal to bring down the hammer on Pelosi. Aside from Jack Jenkins at RNS, this is the only new media inquiry. It will be ignored, too.”
The email indicates that not only is the archdiocese ignoring the Washington Examiner’s request, the archdiocese is also intending to ignore other requests that solicit the cardinal to “bring down the hammer on Pelosi.”
The archdiocese of Washington has not responded to The Daily Wire’s requests for comment.
“There will be moments when I will be able to speak to him about faith, about the works that he is trying to accomplish that we can be supportive of, but also areas where we’re not going to agree,” Gregory said in November 2020. “But I’m going to always try to do it in a respectful way.”
In September 2021, however, the archbishop offered a rare rebuke of Biden’s denial that life begins at conception, telling the president that “the Catholic Church teaches, and has taught, that human life begins at conception, so the president is not demonstrating Catholic teaching.”
“Our church has not changed its position on the immorality of abortion,” Gregory added. “I don’t see how we could because we believe that every human life is sacred.”
To receive Holy Communion, which Catholics believe is the body of Jesus Christ, one must be in a state of grace, which means that an individual has recently gone to the sacrament of confession and confessed all serious or mortal sins, and one must have fasted for at least an hour.
The Catholic News Agency cites the Catechism of the Catholic Church in reporting that a mortal sin “destroys charity in the heart of man by a grave violation of God’s law; it turns man away from God.” Examples of mortal sins are murder, adultery, pornography, theft, and missing mass on Sunday.
The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is “a crime against human life,” “constitutes a grave offense” and that a person who obtains an abortion is automatically excommunicated from the Catholic Church.
Additionally, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has emphasized that Catholics in politics “have an obligation in conscience to work toward correcting morally defective laws, lest they be guilty of cooperating in evil and in sinning against the common good.”
Pelosi has not responded to many requests for comment from The Daily Wire.