(NewsGlobal.com)- Last Friday, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone announced that he would bar Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from receiving Holy Communion over her strident support for abortion. And in a subsequent interview for the Jesuit magazine “America,” Cordileone said the timing of his decision had nothing to do with the leaked draft opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
When asked by “America” magazine writer Gloria Purvis why he made the decision now, given the fervor over the leaked opinion, Cordileone said the Dobbs case and Alito’s opinion “really have nothing to do with the timing of it.”
The archbishop said Pelosi had spoken with him “a couple of times” over the years, but recently, especially in light of Pelosi’s “advocacy for codifying the Roe decision into federal law,” she had become more extreme and aggressive.
Cordileone said he had tried to speak with Pelosi about her abortion activism and had, “for many years” been grappling with what to do, adding that last week’s decision didn’t just “come up recently.”
The archbishop also defended his decision to publicly announce the move, explaining that if Pelosi is to be barred from communion, then those who administer Holy Communion needed to know about it.
Giving Pelosi the benefit the doubt, Cordileone said he believes her Catholic faith is important to her and “she feels devotion in her heart.” At the same time, he explained, that makes it more perplexing to him that as a politician, “she would be so forceful” in her advocacy for abortion.
And while the archbishop conceded that the issue is a tricky one for Catholic politicians who have to “come to some kind of consensus and compromise,” Pelosi’s is “aggressively promoting” abortion, and that isn’t what a devout Catholic should do.
Cordileone’s defense of a perfectly justifiable action is not going well among those who generally despise the Church.
After he initially announced that Pelosi would be barred from communion, demands that the Catholic Church’s tax-exempt status be revoked began almost at once.
On Monday, “The View” co-host Whoopie Goldberg claimed that it wasn’t up to the Archbishop of San Francisco to decide whether Pelosi should be allowed to take communion, saying “this is not your job, dude” [yes, it is his job]
Whoopi: "The archbishop of San Francisco is calling for speaker Nancy Pelosi to be denied receiving Communion because of her pro-choice stance … this is not your job, dude. That is not up to you to make that decision." pic.twitter.com/TCSe0t6XLY
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) May 23, 2022
