President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be denied communion due to their support for abortion, according to an archbishop.
When asked whether he would grant communion to Biden or Pelosi if either Democrat appeared at his church, Salvatore Cordileone, the archbishop of San Francisco, told the Daily Caller that he would have conversations with high-profile supporters of abortion before they appeared in communion line to explain to them why the church would deny them communion.
“I have had … conversations with Speaker Pelosi. She knows that I stand by church teaching, and I know she is respectful enough not to do anything so provocative, so I’m confident that would not happen,” he said. “In the case of President Biden or any other prominent Catholic, I think what I would do is if I knew that they were coming into the area here and planned to attend Mass, I would try to have those conversations, as well, ahead of time.”
PELOSI’S ARCHBISHOP DENIES ONE CAN BE CATHOLIC AND SUPPORT ABORTION
Cordileone encouraged “conversations to take place between pastors, the bishop, or the parish pastor and the individual” so that those who support abortion can “understand the error of their ways” and “understand what the teaching of the church is.”
.@ArchCordileone says he has had conversations with Nancy Pelosi about receiving communion from him as a pro-abortion Catholic.
“She knows that I stand by Church teaching, and I know she’s respectful enough not to do anything so provocative.” pic.twitter.com/qvKY4wH8b6
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) May 11, 2021
Pelosi, who resides in Cordileone’s archdiocese in San Francisco, and Biden support abortion rights despite being Catholic. The church opposes all forms of abortion.
The San Francisco archbishop alluded to this stance before, writing in a letter earlier this month that church leaders have an obligation “to correct Catholics who erroneously, and sometimes stubbornly, promote abortion.”
“This correction takes several forms and rightly begins with private conversations between the erring Catholic and his or her parish priest or bishop,” he wrote in the open letter. “Because we are dealing with public figures and public examples of cooperation in moral evil, this correction can also take the public form of exclusion from the reception of Holy Communion.”
In response to a similar letter from Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles saying that bishops were contemplating “the worthiness to receive holy Communion,” other church leaders, such as Cardinal Luis Ladaria, congregation prefect at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, urged caution when dealing with public officials who express views deemed at odds with the teachings of the Catholic Church.
“The effective development of a policy in this area requires that dialogue occurs in two stages: first among the bishops themselves, and then between bishops and Catholic pro-choice politicians within their jurisdictions,” Ladaria wrote in a Friday letter to Gomez, adding it would be “misleading” to present abortion and euthanasia as “the only grave matters of Catholic moral and social teaching that demand the fullest level of accountability on the part of Catholics.”
As leader of the Vatican, Pope Francis has adopted more socially liberal views than those of his predecessors, enacting policies allowing women to assume larger roles at Mass, arguing same-sex unions should be “legally covered,” and voicing support for liberal stances on political issues such as climate change and the death penalty. The pope even participated in a climate summit hosted by the Biden White House last month.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Pelosi has invoked her Catholic faith in political contexts. When asked whether she hated former President Donald Trump, Pelosi said that “as a Catholic,” she “resent[ed] the use of the word ‘hate,'” adding she prayed for the then-president “all the time.”
Biden is known to be a frequent churchgoer, and the president attends weekly Mass.
