San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, who announced Friday that he would bar House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from receiving Holy Communion due to her stance on abortion, said that the timing of his announcement had “nothing to do” with the leaked Supreme Court opinion overturning the abortion precedent Roe v. Wade.
San Francisco is home to Pelosi’ domicile mansion, and the City of San Francisco is represented in Congress by Pelosi.
“With all that’s going on right now – with Dobbs v. Jackson and the leaked opinion [suggesting] that Roe could be overturned – why make this decision now?” Gloria Purvis asked Cordileone in an interview for America, the magazine of the Jesuits of the United States.
“The leaked decision and the Dobbs case really have nothing to do with the timing of it,” the archbishop responded Friday. I’ve been trying to speak with her about this,” Cordileone added in the America interview. “I’ve been debating this within my own conscience for many years, actually. So this is not something that has just come up recently. I’ve been discerning this. ”
The archbishop defended his decision to make the decision public, saying, “If she’s not to be admitted to Holy Communion, our priests and extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, all those who are Communion ministers need to know that.”
He also described Pelosi’s outspoken support for abortion as a “scandal.”
“Scandal is an action that would lead others into error or into sin,” Cordileone said. “So the scandal here is that someone who is strongly advocating for something as evil as abortion and taking Communion creates confusion among people. And they can begin to think that it is acceptable for a Catholic to believe this.”