No, but expect this narrative to crop up with the talking heads and the cafeteria “C&E” Catholics. For those of you who haven’t heard, Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke said that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi should be forbidden from Holy Communion. The prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura in Rome is a leader in the highest court in the Vatican. As a jurist, His Eminence said the issue was a matter of canon law. Since this was an interview to a newspaper, it is not a formal ruling, but instead exposes the Vatican official’s perspective on the case should it come for a judicial purview.
“Certainly this is a case when Canon 915 must be applied,” Cardinal Burke declared, “This is a person who obstinately, after repeated admonitions, persists in a grave sin — cooperating with the crime of procured abortion — and still professes to be a devout Catholic.” He added:
This is a prime example of what Blessed John Paul II referred to as the situation of Catholics who have divorced their faith from their public life and therefore are not serving their brothers and sisters in the way that they must — in safeguarding and promoting the life of the innocent and defenseless unborn, in safeguarding and promoting the integrity of marriage and the family.
For hostile reporters, however, this represents a boorish exercise of political power. “The Catholic Church has just become more conservative and is trying to push out progressives through strong-arm tactics that support partisan causes,” they may say. Isn’t it just mean to kick out pro-choice folks from the religion club? After all, even abortionists can find meaning at Mass, right?
Media pundits fail to understand that such canon laws and their enforcement spring from love—not of power, but of the people involved in this particular case.
First, the Roman Church is protecting Nancy Pelosi’s soul. There has never been a time when the Church has not considered abortion and infanticide a sin. Abortion is murder; one’s private opinion on the issue does not matter. That is not how the Church works, nor has she ever, nor—by God’s grace—will she ever. What is more, it is the Christian statesman’s responsibility to make and enforce laws against murder. The Church has rightly deemed it fit that leaders who facilitate murder commit sin.
As an advocate for the abortionist position, Nancy Pelosi is in a state of unrepentant sin. The Church cannot pull the lever for her at a House vote; she is responsible for that moral decision. But the clergy are responsible for the shepherding and safeguarding of her soul. In St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, he writes, “But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.” To partake “unworthily” of the Eucharist is to heap damnation on oneself. As long as Representative Pelosi (very publicly) embraces sin, the Church cannot responsibly allow her to partake of the feast for her own safety. Contrary to popular opinion, the Eucharist is where Christians eat Christ’s Body and drink His Blood. Representative Pelosi, the rest of the laity, and the world must learn that the Mass is not simply an exercise in ceremonial therapy and spiritualism.
Second, the Roman Church is doing its best to guard innocent lives. Abortion has snuffed the life out of millions of human beings. As one Body, the Catholic Church needs to protect the unborn. Lax “pick-and-choose” laymen—generally in comfortable Western contexts—feel like they can flout inconvenient church dogmas, doctrines, and teachings. They find a visible inspiration in such public pro-abortion Catholics like Pelosi and others in Congress who lay concern for the unborn babies by the wayside.
The Church is not a country club; she is an instantiation of Christ’s Kingdom on earth. It may take Representative Pelosi and others a long while to realize this, but maybe the exercise of church discipline will clarify this reality for them. And here’s to other communions being as assiduous in the discipleship and social witness of their members.
Comment by Rebecca Downs on September 25, 2013 at 1:06 pm
Great title, lol! But, in all seriousness, it is a good one, because I very much believe Nancy Pelosi brings this all upon herself. If I’m not mistaken, Francis had called for more consistency on denying Communion to those who support abortion. This is a notable step in the move for that consistency. I must say shame on Cardinal Wuerl though for his previous comments.
Comment by Karen Dickman on September 25, 2013 at 2:30 pm
While I have no disagreement with the Church’s stand against abortion I do find it disingenuous that Communion is only withheld from pro-choice politicians, and never from those who refuse to feed the poor or heal the sick, especially when the poor and the sick were often made that way by the public policy those same politicians created.
Comment by Jacob on September 26, 2013 at 8:52 am
It’s not your right to decide whose ways of helping the poor are wrong.. There is no possible way that murdering babies is ever right for anyone.
Comment by Ryan Hunter on September 25, 2013 at 3:56 pm
This is great Bart! I imagine that Representative Pelosi, raised as she was in the Roman Catholic Church, realizes that her public stances on abortion and gay marriage violate the Church’s teachings. She clearly doesn’t care, and doesn’t feel that there are any real consequences for her, spiritually or temporally.
This kind of total disconnect – where people feel comfortable embracing or paying lip service to totally different ideas in the pews and in the halls of Congress- is symptomatic of a much deeper sickness in the Church today.
We see it in all the churches to varying extents, born out of relativism and a kind of compartmentalization between our life “at church” and our life “during the week”.
How is it that one of the senior-most U.S. politicians, once third in line to the presidential succession, who comes from a Catholic family, who considers herself a practicing Catholic, can still somehow reconcile this with the reality that she has publicly misstated, misquoted and openly opposed her Church’s teachings on human life and sexuality? It’s a mystery to me. Kudos to Cardinal Burke for speaking up about this.
Comment by Bart Gingerich on September 26, 2013 at 9:40 pm
Yeah, I couldn’t live with that kind of inconsistency.
Comment by Benjamin Keil on September 25, 2013 at 8:53 pm
Karen Dickman,
If you don’t mind indulging my curiosity I’d like to ask the following question. On the assumption that you think that sins of equal severity should be punished equally, and since you think that repeatedly advocating for the intentional killing of the innocent unborn should receive the same punishment as not feeding the poor, should I conclude that you think publicly agitating for abortion is as bad a sin as failing to care for the poor? (They don’t strike me as being of comparable moral severity, and hence not deserving of the same punishment…but do you disagree, and is that why you think they should be punished equally?)
Yours Sincerely,
~Benjamin
Comment by Simplynotred on September 25, 2013 at 9:29 pm
I have always wondered what kind of Catholics recognize Nancy Pelosi and believe her to be a Catholic. I have never met anyone who does. I believe that her family are originally Jewish and that she is in theory a convert to Catholicism, or her immediate family was. She behaves politically and morally very much like a reformist Jew whose promotion of progressive government policies such as abortion, gay rights, feminist rights, socialized economic policies etc. make one think that she is anti-Catholic. I have never see her support the values and morals of the Catholic Church, so I seriously wonder why it has taken the Vatican this long to condemn this so-called Catholic Politician after all the time that she has spent crossing swords with the Catholic Church. The hypocrisy is that she calls herself Catholic. But where’s the beef? Thank you Cardinal Burke for calling a spade a spade.
Comment by S.Newark on September 26, 2013 at 10:16 am
Add to this unfortunate persons all the supposedly “women religious” who mistakenly profess Pelosi’s heresy.
Comment by Don on September 30, 2013 at 5:10 pm
No, I think there may be a specific thing for Pelosi on Burke’s part. Is he afraid of the others? After all, Biden, Sebelius, Andrew Cuomo, Mary Landrieu, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Loretta Sanchez, Rosa de Lauro, Justices Sotomayor and Kennedy, and whole cast of 100s could stand to be excommunicated. Why the Cardinal’s one little yelp about Pelosi? And why in the Vatican paper. Why don’t they just rule on it?