ROME — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi attended Mass in the Vatican presided over by Pope Francis Wednesday, and received Holy Communion not from the pope himself but from another priest assisting at the Mass.

It was unclear whether the priest knew who Mrs. Pelosi was or that she has been banned from receiving Communion in her home archdiocese of San Francisco for her aggressive promotion of abortion, which the Catholic Church considers to be murder.

At a reception Tuesday evening at the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See, Pelosi said she was visiting Rome in a private capacity as part of a family vacation.

In 2021, Pelosi praised Pope Francis’ “immense moral clarity,” but carefully avoided any mention of abortion, which Francis has described as “murder” and a “scourge,” likening it to hiring a paid assassin to take out a child. A “just society recognizes the primacy of the right to life from conception to natural death,” he has asserted.

In January 2015, Pelosi said that she knew “more about having babies than the pope,” insisting that a woman has “the right” to an abortion.

In her acceptance speech for abortion giant Planned Parenthood’s highest honor — the Margaret Sanger Award — Pelosi, who identifies as a Catholic, went still further, calling pro-lifers (like the pope) “dumb,” “closed-minded,” and “oblivious.”

U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (R) attends a mass for the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul led by the pope on June 29, 2022 at St Peter’s basilica (TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images)

In a 2015 interview, Pope Francis underscored the paradox of modern secular societies that go to great lengths to protect children from harm, and yet defend a so-called “right” to abortion.

“Curiously,” he said, these countries with very strict laws regarding the protection of minors, who even punish fathers or mothers who spank their children, “have laws allowing them to kill their children before they are born.”

“Those are the contradictions we live with now,” he said.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last Friday, returning the issue of abortion to the states, Mrs. Pelosi called the court’s ruling the cumulation of a “dark, extreme” effort led by the Republican party.

“Because of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party, their super majority and Supreme Court, American women today have less freedom than their mothers,” Pelosi said. “With Roe and their attempt to destroy it, radical Republicans are charging ahead with their radical crusade to criminalize health freedom.”

The U.S. Catholic bishops, on the other hand, registered their “joy” over the court’s decision, praising the ruling for overturning an “unjust law” that had resulted in “the deaths of tens of millions of preborn children, generations that were denied the right to even be born.”

For his part, Catholic League president Bill Donohue also lauded the decision as a victory for democracy and a victory for life.

“It is a credit to the Catholic Church that it led the discussion on the morality of abortion for all these years,” Dr. Donohue noted in his June 24 essay. “This ruling makes us proud to be Catholic.”