Speaker Pelosi denied communion by San Francisco archbishop for support of abortion

The archbishop of San Francisco said Friday that he won’t allow U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to receive Communion because of her support for abortion rights.

In an announcement, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said he sent Pelosi a letter April 7 expressing concerns after she vowed to codify the Supreme Court’s Row vs. Wade decision into law once Texas approved a law banning most abortions. He said Pelosi never responded.

He also tweeted the announcement, saying, “After numerous attempts to speak with Speaker Pelosi to help her understand the grave evil she is perpetrating, the scandal she is causing, an the danger to her own soul she is risking, I have determined that she is not to be admitted to Holy Communion.”

Cordileone said he told Pelosi in the April letter that she must either repudiate her support of abortion rights or stop speaking publicly about her Catholic faith.

“I am hereby notifying you that you are not to present yourself for Holy Communion and, should you do so, you are not to be admitted to Holy Communion, until such time as you publicly repudiate your advocacy for the legitimacy of abortion and confess and receive absolution of this grave sin in the sacrament of Penance,” he wrote, per The Associated Press.

“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. Therefore, universal Church law provides that such persons ‘are not to be admitted to Holy Communion,’” he says in the letter.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is unambiguous on the question of abortion, both in procuring one and assisting in the practice: “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion,” the catechism says. “This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable.”

“Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law,” it says, before calling abortion and infanticide “abominable crimes.”

It also declares that “Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life.”