Nancy Pelosi excommunicated

Yesterday afternoon, the Archbishop of San Francisco excommunicated Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Speaker of the House of Representatives. Most Rev. Salvatore J. Cordileone issued her an open notice to that effect.

Technical difficulties, please stand by…

The Archbishop first published his Notice to Nancy Pelosi on the website of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. But within five hours the site began having technical issues. As of this posting, this original link does not work. Indeed all attempts to reach the domain sfarchdiocese.org resolve as “HTTP 403: Forbidden.” (Nor does changing browsers work; your editor tried Firefox by Mozilla and the two Chromium browsers Vivaldi and Brave.) So the Archbishop acknowledged the technical problems and republished his Notice on Catholic World Report.

The Archbishop has not announced why he thinks his archdiocesan site won’t work. But a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the site would be in keeping with spectacles like:

• Parading in front of Supreme Court Justices’ houses, in violation of the law, and
• Vandalism at crisis pregnancy clinics or pro-life organizational offices, including one tossing of a Molotov cocktail.

Besides Catholic World Report, other sources for this story include Just the News, The Blaze, Independent Journal Review, American Liberty News, and SFGate. In addition, we have these tweets from the Archbishop himself:

In that last, the Archbishop set up “A Rose and a Rosary for Nancy Pelosi” at the Benedict XVI Institute.

CNAV has determined to keep the original link, hoping that the Archdiocese will overcome the technical issue, cybervandalism, DdoS Attack, or whatever.

What Nancy Pelosi did to rate excommunication

Archbishop Cordileone laid out his reasons to excommunicate Nancy Pelosi in a notification he addressed to her. He began by citing the Vatican II degree, Gaudium et Spes, which says in part:

From the first moment of conception life must be guarded with the greatest care while abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes.

He also cited a letter by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2004. In that letter the future Pope Benedict XVI explicitly called on Catholic clergy to refuse Communion to any politician who supports abortion. That procedure derives from the one that Jesus Himself outlined for dealing with a brother in sin (Matthew 18:15-20).

Accordingly, the Archbishop said he has met with Nancy Pelosi often in the past. But ever since she supported HR 3755 for a federal abortion code, she has refused to see the Archbishop again. He wrote to her on April 7, 2022, asking her to either:

• Repudiate her support for abortion, or else
• Stop pretending in public that her Catholic teachings permit it.

She did neither, as we all observe. In fact, this tweet, and her op-ed in the Seattle Times, show that she is unrepentant and defiant.

So finally, having had enough, he excommunicated her. He cited the Code of Canon Law, Canon 383, Section 1.

Though he dates his letter on May 19, he did not publish it until May 20.

What took the Church so long?

Excommunicating Nancy Pelosi is not the Archbishop’s first stand on a controversial issue. Recently he signed an open letter to German bishops, urging them to desist from taking “woke” stances and repudiating Scripture.

And on January 22, in the West Coast Walk for Life, he offered a homily against abortion, and more broadly against diluting Christian teachings with worldly ideas.

But your editor (a non-Catholic) still wonders: what took the Church so long to act? And why did Pope Francis actually tell President Joe Biden that he should still take Communion? (Or did the President lie about that?)

In all seriousness, the Ratzinger Letter went out in 2004. Such a letter should have come out long before this. And regarding Nancy Pelosi, she has been a communicant in the Archbishop of San Francisco for decades. During that time, she has seen Archbishops of San Francisco come and go. Salvatore Cordileone has held the post since 2012. Why did it take him ten years to act? For one cannot say that her open advocacy of abortion began with HR 3755, which the House passed in reaction to the Texas Heartbeat Act. She has always advocated for abortion – perhaps more vehemently today than ever, but still for a very long time.

CNAV applauds the Archbishop for finally acting as he did, though perhaps he showed entirely too much patience. Part of “letting every soul subject himself to the governing authorities” is holding those authorities to a high standard of official conduct.