San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone said Thursday that Speaker Nancy Pelosi owes pro-life voters an apology, noting that no Catholic worthy of the name would be pro-choice.
“Speaker Pelosi has chosen this week to impugn the motives of millions of Catholics and others for choosing to make voting on the issue of abortion their priority and accuses them of ‘selling out democracy,’” Archbishop Cordileone said in a statement. “This is not the language of unity and healing. She owes these voters an apology.”
The archbishop was responding to comments Pelosi made this week in which she criticized pro-life Americans who voted for Donald Trump over the abortion issue, accusing them of “being willing to sell the whole democracy down the river for that one issue.”
“No Catholic in good conscience can favor abortion,” Cordileone said. “‘Right to choose’ is a smokescreen for perpetuating an entire industry that profits from one of the most heinous evils imaginable. Our land is soaked with the blood of the innocent, and it must stop.”
“That is why, as Catholics, we will continue to speak out on behalf of those who have no voice to speak for themselves and reach out to, comfort and support those who are suffering the scars of the abortion experience,” he added. “We will do so, until our land is finally rid of this despicable evil.”
The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is an unspeakable evil and a grave injustice, one of the very few crimes for which the Church imposes its most severe punishment: automatic excommunication.
Nancy Pelosi not only does not speak for the Catholic church, the archbishop said in his statement. “She also speaks in direct contradiction to a fundamental human right that Catholic teaching has consistently championed for 2,000 years.”
Cordileone said Christians have steadfastly opposed abortion since the earliest days up to the present, noting that Pope Francis has “condemned abortion in the strongest possible terms” and reiterating that it is never licit under any circumstances.
Archbishop Cordileone was not the only bishop to point out the hypocrisy of pro-abortion Catholic politicians.
Last week, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan said Catholics have good reason to be “hung up” about the abortion issue, especially when our new president “ran on a platform avidly supporting this gruesome capital punishment for innocent pre-born babies.”
“How can we sustain a culture that recoils at violence, exclusion, suicide, racism, injustice, and callousness toward those in need, if we applaud, allow, pay for, and promote the destruction of the most helpless, the baby in the womb?” he asked.
As a matter of fact, “we are ‘hung up’ on the civil rights of the baby in the sanctuary of her mother’s womb,” he wrote.
For her part, Nancy Pelosi has been a vocal advocate for abortion and a supporter of abortion giant Planned Parenthood, despite her claim to self-identify as a Catholic.
In 2015, Pelosi said she knew “more about having babies than the pope” and that a woman has “the right” to an abortion.
In her acceptance speech for Planned Parenthood’s highest honor, the Margaret Sanger Award, Pelosi went still further, calling pro-lifers “dumb,” “closed-minded,” and “oblivious.”
At that time, Pelosi’s comments also drew a stern response from Archbishop Cordileone, who stated that “no Catholic can dissent in good conscience” from Church teaching on the sanctity of life.