In hot water with the Catholic bishop’s conference for remarks on “Meet the Press” that her church has historically waffled on when human life begins, pro-choice Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi now has a cleric from her childhood parish to contend with.
“All the popes have said that life begins at conception and ends with natural death,” said the Rev. Louis Rojas, assistant pastor of St. Leo the Great Roman Catholic Church in Baltimore’s Little Italy district. “And we do not have the right to interfere with any part of that process. If [Pelosi] were to read the Catholic catechism, she’d see that it states clearly that life begins with conception and ends with natural death.”
Pelosi, daughter of onetime Baltimore mayor Tommy D’Alesandro Jr. and a St. Leo’s parishioner at the time, was responding to a question by show moderator Tom Brokaw about Democratic presidential candidate Barack OBama’s earlier handling of the matter in a televised interview with Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren.
“I would say that, as an ardent practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time,” Pelosi, who now lives in San Francisco, said. “And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition.”
Reminded by Brokaw that the Catholic Church “at the moment feels very strongly” that life begins at conception, Pelosi said, “I understand that … this is an issue of controversy.”
Reflecting sentiments held by Baltimore Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, Cardinal Justin Rigali, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Pro-Life Activities, shot back that “Speaker Nancy Pelosi misrepresented the history and nature of the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church against abortion.”
Rigali did allow that some “uninformed and inadequate theories about embryology” had led some Medieval theologians to speculate on human life’s beginning. But, he added, “The Church’s moral teaching never justified or permitted abortion at any stage of development.”
“It’s correct that the church once made a distinction between ‘formed’ and ‘unformed’ [life],” said Rev. Martin Burnham, pastor of St. Andrew by the Bay Catholic Church in Annapolis. “But that related to penitential distinctions in sinfulness, not at all to the wrongness of taking human life.
“But to say that [there was indecision about] abortion being a grave moral evil, that’s never been a question.”
