Placeholder while loading article actions
ROME – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Catholic and advocate for the right to abortion, received Holy Communion Wednesday during a papal mass at St. Peter’s Basilica, according to a Mass attendee .
The ceremony at the Vatican contrasted sharply with the decision of the conservative archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore J. Cordileone, to instruct the priests of his diocese to retain the Eucharist at Pelosi. for his position on abortion.
In September, Pope Francis had said: “I have never rejected the Eucharist to anyone,” although he later added that he had never been conscious during Communion with a politician who supported the right to abortion and went reiterating the Church’s position that abortion is “murder.” But Francis had said that the decision to grant communion to politicians who support the right to abortion should be taken from a pastoral, not a political, point of view.
Pelosi challenges the denial of the archbishop’s communion over abortion rights
Communion for Pelosi comes shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it in 1973 Roe against Wade decision, erasing the right to abortion. In a statement on the decision, the Pontifical Academy for Life of the Vatican called for a “non-ideological” debate: “In the face of Western society that is losing its passion for life, this act is a powerful invitation to reflect together on the serious and urgent. question of human generativity and the conditions that make it possible, ”said the director of the academy, Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia.
During Mass at the Vatican on Wednesday, it was not 85-year-old Francis who personally gave Pelosi the holy wafer, as his active participation in Masses is increasingly limited by a knee condition that often forces you to use a wheelchair. Before Mass, Pelosi received a greeting with the pope where he received a blessing, according to an attendee.
The Vatican made no statement on the matter and declined to comment. But in a city-state like the Vatican, imbued with religious symbolism and the center of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, the Communion of Pelosi can hardly be considered an oversight. It took place on the day that Francis issued an apostolic letter extolling the virtues of the Mass, reminding his church how this celebration belongs to “the totality of the faithful united in Christ.”
“The liturgy does not say ‘I’ but ‘we,'” Francis wrote in his letter, “and any limitation on the breadth of this ‘we’ is always demonic.”
In October, Francis met with Pelosi during a private hearing at the Vatican, which the speaker later described as “a spiritual, personal and official honor.” It remains to be seen whether the Communion given to Pelosi can have any effect on Cordileone’s decision, which was shared by at least four other dioceses based in the United States. Cordileone’s order to deny Pelosi applies only to the churches of his diocese, where Pelosi resides.
Pelosi has rejected Cordileone’s order, questioning whether he was applying a double standard by allowing politicians who support the death penalty, which is opposed by the Catholic Church, to receive the sacrament.
Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at the University of Villanova, said what happened on Wednesday reinforces the impression that there are two approaches to abortion within the Catholic Church, an even more sensitive issue after the Court’s decision. Supreme that annulled. Roe against Wade.
It is unclear whether the Vatican clearly intended Pelosi to receive the Eucharist, but Vatican authorities would surely have been aware of his presence and plan to attend Mass at St. Peter’s, Faggioli said.
“This was no surprise. Of course, on these issues, the Vatican can and should leave some things unsaid,” he said. “The fact that it was not the pope who gave him communion allows the Vatican to preserve a minimum of denial. They are not interested in blatantly putting a finger in their eye ”by Cordileone.
But the reversal of Roe against Wade it will make it difficult for the Vatican to vigorously defend Pelosi, President Biden, and other Catholics who support abortion rights.
“As long as Roe against Wade it was the law, you could say: these people are Catholic but they still have to respect the law, ”Faggioli said.
But Faggioli does not believe that Francis, who has called for the church to be more inclusive, should let himself be painted in a corner.
Abortion has become one of the sectarian parameters used by Catholic conservatives in the United States to decide if you are Catholic, Faggioli said. This idea, he said, “does not belong to Pope Francis, who never changed the church’s teaching on abortion, but has always maintained that a church is not a country club.”
“This is one of the key points of his papacy. That’s one of the things he and the American bishops don’t see things eye to eye with, ”Faggioli said.
correction
An earlier version of this article said that the Mass Pelosi attended took place on Friday. It happened Wednesday.