House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insinuated Tuesday on “Morning Joe” that San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone denying her communion is a double standard.
Cordileone notified the House speaker and San Francisco’s clergymen in a Friday letter that she is not to receive communion in the city’s diocese due to her support for abortion access. Pelosi told hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski that abortion is being used as a “frontman” to reverse a wider range of issues connected to women and families.
“What is important for women to know and families to know that this is not just about terminating a pregnancy. These same people are against contraception, family planning and in-vitro fertilization,” she said. “It’s a blanket thing, and they use abortion as a frontman for it while they try to undo so much. That’s what they try to do in the Affordable Care Act, which didn’t have anything to do with terminating a pregnancy.”
She then pointed to the Catholic Church’s opposition to the death penalty, saying clergyman do not appear to deny communion to those advocating for capital punishment. (RELATED: Pelosi Receives Communion After Her Own Diocese Denies It)
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“I wonder about the death penalty, which I am opposed to, so is the Church. But they take no action against people who may not share their view,” she said. “Thank you for referencing the Gospel of Matthew, which is sort of the agenda of the Church that is rejected by many who side with them on terminating a pregnancy. So, we just have to be prayerful, we have to be respectful.”
She then turned to Cordileone’s history of holding the traditional Catholic viewpoints on LGBTQ issues, calling him “vehemently against LGBTQ rights.”
“Now our archbishop has been vehemently against LGBTQ rights, too. In fact, he led the way on an initiative on the ballot in California. So, this decision taking us to privacy and precedent is very dangerous in the lives of so many of the American people and, again, not consistent with the Gospel of Matthew.”
She told Brzezinski that the Women’s Health Protection Act attempted to “enshrine Roe v. Wade into law,” then criticized pro-choice Republicans for voting against the legislation. The legislation, which failed to pass the Senate, intended to lift restrictions on late term and partial-birth abortion and eliminate conscience protection for healthcare workers.
“As a Catholic, I tried to talk some of my Republican colleagues some years ago into supporting what the Catholic Church was asking us to do for global family planning, natural family planning, which our law allows to happen,” Pelosi added. “And they said, ‘We’re not for family planning domestically or globally, we’re against it.'”
The House Speaker said it is “insulting to women” for abortion access to be politicized and called it a “cover” for the far-right agenda. She concluded that a woman’s ability to terminate her pregnancy is a “kitchen table issue.”
Catholic teaching states any person “who is conscious of grave sin is not to celebrate Mass or receive the body of the Lord without previous sacramental confession unless there is a grave reason and there is no opportunity to confess,” according to the Vatican’s code of canon law. The Church teaches that “human life begins at conception” and therefore abortion is “gravely wrong” and a “moral evil,” according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.