ROME — Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has boasted of openly defying the archbishop of San Francisco, continuing to receive Holy Communion despite having been banned from doing so.
In an interview with the leftwing National Catholic Reporter, Pelosi was asked about a 2022 letter from San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, in which the archbishop said he would no longer allow her to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist in his archdiocese because of her pro-abortion advocacy.
“I received Communion anyway. That’s his problem, not mine,” Pelosi said.
“My Catholic faith is, Christ is my savior. It has nothing to do with the bishops,” she added.
The archbishop reportedly had attempted several times to meet with Pelosi in private in the hope of avoiding a public confrontation, and only issued the ban after these efforts proved unsuccessful.
Curiously, in the same interview, Pelosi praised the important role of the bishops as divinely sanctioned.
She criticized the Vatican’s 2018 deal with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in which the Vatican ceded some authority in the process of appointing Catholic bishops in the country.
“Let me say it this way, ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church,’” Pelosi asserted. “Every bishop has sprung from that rock. And now, the Chinese government?”
Concerning the recent presidential election and the Democrats’ decisive loss of the Catholic vote, Pelosi suggested that low voter turnout might have been a causal factor.
“A lot of people didn’t vote,” she said. “That subtracted from our number, and that may be why we have fewer Catholics voting that way.” According to the Associated Press (AP), Donald Trump won by a formidable 15-point margin among Catholic voters.
The Catholic rejection of the Democratic Party was “a complete departure from what we were raised to believe was our social contract in terms of being Catholic and our responsibilities to other people,” Pelosi lamented.
Shortly after the publication of the interview, Archbishop Cordileone issued a statement clarifying his history with Nancy Pelosi, especially regarding her pro-abortion activism.
In the first place, “I would like to renew my request for prayers for the Speaker’s conversion on the issue of human life in the womb, that it be consistent with the respect for human dignity she displays in so many other contexts,” the archbishop wrote.
He then went on to cite the prophet Ezekiel, who urged pastors to correct those who stray from the path (Ez 3:20-21).
As Ezekiel reminds us, “For a pastor to fulfill his calling, he has the duty not only to teach, console, heal and forgive, but also, when necessary, to correct, admonish and call to conversion,” Cordileone said.
Emphasizing the need for honest dialogue, Cordileone went on to “earnestly repeat once again my plea to Speaker Pelosi to allow this kind of dialogue to happen.”
“I ask this not only to dialogue in areas of disagreement, such as if and when it can ever be morally permissible to kill innocent human life, but also in other critical areas where our views on behalf of human life and dignity are aligned,” he said.
On Thursday, Pelosi said that she had appealed to Rome following the archbishop’s decision to prohibit her from receiving Holy Communion.
“My understanding, as long as Rome has the case, it hasn’t been resolved,” Pelosi told the National Catholic Reporter.
Commenting on Pelosi’s cavalier approach to the matter and open defiance of her archbishop, Ed Condon, editor of the Catholic online news outlet The Pillar, noted that such an attitude could prove unwise.
“I would just note that this is a sad stance for her to take,” Condon wrote. “Her continued reception of the sacrament in a state of grave sin is very much ‘her problem.’”
