In September, Pope Francis said “I have never refused the Eucharist to anyone”, although he later added that he had never knowingly met during Communion a politician supporting the right to abortion, and reiterated the Church’s position that abortion is “murder”. But above all, Francis had said that the decision to grant communion to politicians who support abortion rights should be made from a pastoral, not a political, perspective.
Pelosi’s communion is coming soon, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade of 1973, removing the constitutional right to abortion. The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life reacted to this decision by calling for a “non-ideological” debate: “Faced with a Western society losing its taste for life, this act is a powerful invitation to reflect together on the serious and urgent question of human generativity and the conditions that make it possible,” said Academy Director Mons. Vincenzo Paglia.
During Friday’s mass at the Vatican, according to media reports, it was not Francis who personally delivered the host to Pelosi, as his active participation in masses is increasingly hampered by a knee condition that often confines him. to a wheelchair.
The Vatican provided no statement on this and declined to comment. But in a city-state like the Vatican, steeped in religious symbolism, Pelosi’s Communion can hardly be considered an oversight. It came on the day Francis issued an apostolic letter extolling the virtues of the Mass, reminding his church how such a celebration belongs to “the totality of the faithful united in Christ.”
“The liturgy does not say ‘I’ but ‘we’,” Francis writes in his letter, “and any limitation of the scope of this ‘we’ is always demonic.”
It remains to be seen whether the communion given to Pelosi can have any effect on Cordileone’s decision, which was shared by at least four other U.S.-based dioceses. Cordileone’s order to deny Pelosi applies only to churches in his diocese, where Pelosi resides.
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