[ad_1]
Nancy Pelosi took communion during a mass presided over by Pope Francis, in Saint Peter’s Basilica, at the Vatican, Wednesday, June 29. This eminently private event immediately took on a political dimension, five days after the abolition of the constitutional right to abortion decided by the Supreme Court in the United States. Because Salvatore Cordileone, the bishop of San Francisco, city of the district where she is elected, prohibited the priests of his diocese from granting the Eucharist to the Democratic and Catholic president of the House of Representatives, on the grounds that she supports the right of women to terminate their pregnancy.
Since the election of Joe Biden – also a Catholic – to the White House, the question of whether they should refuse communion to pro-abortion elected officials has agitated the American bishops. So much so that the Vatican intervened to curb the punitive ardor of the most conservative among them.
The elected American, on vacation in Italy, attended in a VIP square the mass during which the Argentine pope presented the cloak (a liturgical ornament) to newly appointed archbishops. She did not receive the Eucharist from the hands of Francis, who, already in Argentina, avoided giving it himself to cut short any political recuperation, but from one of the many priests present, among the other faithful. That very morning, Nancy Pelosi had met the pontiff and received a blessing from him.
This double attention – the meeting then the mass – strongly resembles a disavowal for the proscription inflicted on the Democrat by Mgr Cordileone. In the letter by which he had made it public, the Archbishop of San Francisco had put forward “the grave evil she commits, the scandal she causes, the danger she runs for her own soul”, to forbid her communion if she did not give up defending the right to abortion. When the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade from 1973, Mme Pelosi denounced a decision “scandalous and heartbreaking”.
The conservative wing of the American episcopate
After the election of Joe Biden, the powerful conservative wing of the American episcopate had wanted to have the episcopal conference, the USCCB, adopt a joint declaration which would have allowed a general ban on communion for elected supporters of the freedom of choice for women, president included. Luis Ladaria Ferrer, the prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, at the Vatican, had written to them in May 2021 to ask them to reconsider the draft of their text. “Such a policy, given its potentially contentious nature, could backfire and become a source of divisiveness rather than unity” in the Church of the United States, he wrote.
You have 22.44% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
[ad_2]