In defending House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pro-abortion stances, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough suggested Tuesday that Jesus Christ was not against abortion.
The MSNBC host accused pro-life activists of “dragging the politics of abortion up into the altar of the church,” noting that the Southern Baptist Church, to which he says he belongs, was “effectively pro-choice until 1980.”
“This wasn’t about Jesus. It was about politics. That was the rise of the moral majority in 1980, bringing abortion politics into the pews of Republican-leaning churches,” he said.
Scarborough then claimed that Jesus “never once mentioned” abortion in the gospels, though most religions holds that abortion is the killing of an unborn child and that an abortion is against the fifth commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.”
“Now, the Catholic Church, mind you, has focused on abortion a bit longer,” he said. “But how disconcerting that religious leaders in that church would deny communion to faithful members of their congregation over a political issue that Jesus never once mentioned in the gospels, despite the fact that abortion was both a political and philosophical issue in ancient Greece and in Rome and when Jesus was alive.”
The MSNBC host emphasized that “Jesus did address most other things that touch our lives.”
“He told his disciples in Matthew 25 that we would be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven if we gave water to the thirsty, fed the hungry, clothed the poor, and brought hope to the hopeless,” Scarborough insisted. “We were to lead with forgiveness and love.”
“So how distressing that a religious leader would bar from communion a congregant who spent her life in politics, focusing really on those truly disadvantaged,” the host opined, before inviting Pelosi to join him in discussing San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s instructions that she no longer receive communion.
Scarborough did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Wire.
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.
In addition, 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.”
Cordileone informed Pelosi on Friday: “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.”
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.