Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) publicly addressed for the first time on Tuesday her archbishop banning her from communion, criticizing San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone for standing by the Catholic Church’s position on LGBTQ issues.
MNSBC’s Joe Scarborough referenced the biblical Gospel of Matthew as he defended Pelosi in his introduction, claiming that Jesus Christ never discussed abortion and instead told his disciples that they would be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven if they “lead with forgiveness and love.”
Pelosi thanked him for this reference as she weighed in on the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion.
“This is not just about terminating a pregnancy,” Pelosi said. “These same people are against contraception, family planning, in vitro-fertilization. It’s a blanket thing. They use abortion as the front man for it while they try to undo so much. That’s what they tried to do in the Affordable Care Act, which didn’t have anything about terminating an abortion — a pregnancy.”
“We just have to be prayerful,” she said. “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 onto others.”
Pelosi then specifically referenced Cordileone.
“Now, our archbishop has been vehemently against LGBTQ rights, too, in fact, he led the way in some of the initiatives on — an initiative on the ballot in California. So this decision, taking us to privacy and precedent, is very dangerous in the lives of so many of the American people.”
Despite Cordileone’s Friday letter informing Pelosi that she no longer receive communion over her ongoing and public support for abortion, the California Democrat attended mass on Sunday at Holy Trinity parish in Georgetown.
Video footage from a livestream viewed by The Daily Wire shows her receiving communion from a eucharistic minister rather than the priest.
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
During her interview on MNSBC, Pelosi was not asked and did not say whether she will continue to receive communion.
On Friday, 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.”
A spokesman for the archdiocese of Washington accidentally admitted to the Washington Examiner on Monday that it is ignoring press inquiries about Pelosi, raising questions about how Archbishop Wilton Gregory, named a cardinal in the Catholic Church by Pope Francis in 2020, will handle Pelosi’s apparent defiance.
“Just sharing for you to know what comes in,” the archdiocese said in an email apparently inadvertently sent to the Washington Examiner. “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 Examiner’s request, the archdiocese is also intending to ignore other requests that solicit the cardinal to “bring down the hammer on Pelosi.”
Gregory has so far refrained from discussing the matter, though he previously said that he would not deny President Joe Biden communion, even as Biden heads arguably the most pro-abortion administration in United States history.
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.