The professed Catholic denies she has fallen afoul of Catholic teaching on abortion, while the archbishop of San Francisco disagrees. What’s next for her?
The professed Catholic denies she has fallen afoul of Catholic teaching on abortion, while the archbishop of San Francisco disagrees. What’s next for the former speaker?
F or many Catholics, learning that the Vatican has a file open on former speaker Nancy Pelosi probably isn’t much of a shock. Over the years, the congresswoman has had her differences with the Catholic Church, of which she remains a member. Most notably on abortion.
But what might surprise many was the news last week that it was Pelosi who referred her own case to Rome, appealing a 2022 injunction by her local shepherd in San Francisco, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, that she be denied Holy Communion over her long and strident support for legal abortion in the United States.
For a woman who has made no bones about defying the church when her politics demand it, it is curious now to see Pelosi of all people appealing to the Vatican for judgment. Unfortunately for her, she’s unlikely to receive a favorable response, or any response at all, at least anytime soon.
What Cordileone did at the time was try to meet with Pelosi, repeatedly, to discuss specifically her promise to entrench the full extent of Roe v. Wade in federal law, which the archbishop warned her was totally at odds with church teaching and, he warned her, gravely sinful.
When Pelosi declined all offers to discuss, and after warning her what his next step would be, the archbishop took the rare step of issuing a public declaration, invoking canon 915 of the church’s universal legal code and declaring that his priests were to deny Pelosi Communion “until such time as you publicly repudiate your advocacy for the legitimacy of abortion and confess and receive absolution of this grave sin.”
This move was widely portrayed as the archbishop “punishing” Pelosi for her political work, and marking her down as “unworthy” to receive Holy Communion. Cordileone was vilified and ridiculed online as a doctrinaire inquisitor and an enemy of women.
And, for all the world could tell, Pelosi herself seemed to shrug off his order, continuing to attend Mass and receive Communion — even flying to Rome to be pictured doing so in St. Peter’s. Last week, she said again that she continued to receive Communion and described her own bishop’s instructions to the contrary as “his problem, not [hers].”
But, it seems, Nancy does see it as her problem, at least a little bit, since she hired a canon lawyer and went about legally challenging Cordileone’s order soon after it was issued — we now know that the case is at the Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments.
A realistic assessment of her case would conclude that it’s likely to stay there, unresolved, for quite a while. Indeed, I’d hazard a guess that, at 84, Pelosi might not live to see a final verdict. The problem is twofold.
That particular Vatican department, the DDW, is led by a cardinal with a very public distaste for American bishops like Cordileone, having moved several times in the past few years to curtail their authority on when and how they can authorize celebration of the traditional Latin Mass and limit what pastoral provisions bishops can make for local Catholics devoted to the old style of the liturgy.
Put simply, that cardinal in that department is unlikely to want to hand a very public win to a bishop like Cordileone, especially on a highly charged issue like withholding Communion from a prominent politician.
But on the other hand, it’s hard to see Pelosi being vindicated either.
Archbishop Cordileone was very clear with her what he was doing and why, and he only made his declaration after several documented efforts to get her to meet with him so they could discuss things privately. Put simply, he seems to have done everything the church tells a bishop you’re supposed to do in these situations — at least on paper.
And, despite some efforts to frame it as such, Cordileone didn’t “punish” Pelosi at all. He didn’t issue an ecclesiastical penalty, he didn’t judge her to have committed a canonical crime, he didn’t declare her excommunicated, or anything like it.
Rather, what the archbishop said was that Pelosi’s public statements on abortion — which the church holds to be the deliberate taking of innocent human life — were, on their face, gravely sinful. And what he did was remind her that the church also teaches that taking Holy Communion in a state of grave sin is actually itself an incredibly spiritually harmful thing to do.
Cordileone’s order that Pelosi should be denied Communion in her home diocese was, theologically and canonically, an intervention to stop the speaker hurting herself.
The Vatican’s department for sacramental discipline can’t really disagree with Cordileone on Pelosi’s case on the substance of it — doing so would effectively be rejecting its own teachings. And while it could try to construct some grounds for overruling the archbishop on procedural matters, they’d be unlikely to try; Cordileone kept, I’ve been told, meticulous notes on the case to make sure he didn’t put a foot wrong.
And in the event he was overruled, he’d be almost certain to appeal the case over the dicastery’s head to the Vatican’s supreme court, the Apostolic Signatura — not a body the DDW would relish grading their homework in public.
More to the point, it’s almost impossible to see the Vatican publicly vindicating Pelosi’s appeal for the simple reason that this all started (and is all continuing) because she refuses to meet with her own bishop to discuss the issue.
In fact, how she has managed to avoid it while appealing is legally pretty curious: The first legal step in canonically appealing an act of a bishop is to ask him to reconsider, something Cordileone has been inviting her in to discuss for a while now and which she seems adamantly opposed to doing.
It’s hard to know what, exactly, Pelosi believes of her religion, since she most unusually invokes it to support a political position — including on subjects like abortion.
But it seems clear she doesn’t believe defying her bishop is doing her any harm, or seem much worried by his warning that her continuing to receive Communion could imperil her soul. And we certainly know she disagrees with the church on the immorality of abortion.
It is odd, then, that she seems to want the Vatican to weigh in on her case too, however unlikely it is to do so — and it is even less likely to side with her. While she has always worn her cultural Catholicism proudly, Pelosi has never been one to let the church tell her what to do or believe.
There’s actually a word for Catholics who dissent from the church on issues of teaching, sacramental discipline, and episcopal governance. They’re called Protestants.