Last year, while Catholic bishops were discussing how to handle pro-abortion politicians, Pope Francis is reported to have said that bishops should be pastoral and work toward a change of their heart, but he added that such people “cannot take communion, because they are out of the community.”
I’m not sure that he wanted a high-profile case to be made. But on Friday, he got one. Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco announced that he was barring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from receiving communion in his diocese, where she has her home. “A Catholic legislator who supports procured abortion, after knowing the teaching of the Church, commits a manifestly grave sin which is a cause of most serious scandal to others,” he explained. Pelosi has spent recent weeks advocating strenuously for duplicating in Congress Roe v. Wade’s national legalization of abortion. Historically, she has also tried to defend her politics as consonant with her Catholic faith and has even tried to cite church Fathers to buttress her support for abortion.
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