WILL PELOSI'S RECOURSE PROMPT VATICAN RESPONSE?

 

Will Pelosi's recourse prompt Vatican response?

JD Flynn

December 13, 2024 . 6:01 AM  

 

 

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, with her husband Paul, prays at a Mass before Joe Biden’s Jan. 20, 2021 presidential inauguration at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Credit: Tom Brenner/Reuters/Alamy

 

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi has waded into canonical conversation this week, as she speaks out against her archbishop’s 2022 decision to prohibit her from the reception of the Eucharist.

During an interview in which Pelosi insisted that she has continued to receive Holy Communion, the congresswoman said an appeal of San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s decision in the case is pending in Rome, and that she has continued to receive the Eucharist at parishes in her local archdiocese.

“As long as Rome has the case, it hasn’t been resolved,” Pelosi told the National Catholic Reporter this month.

But while Pelosi says she’s waiting for a resolution, she is likely to be waiting for some time to come — and Vatican officials likely have very little interest in bringing her recourse to closure.

—

When Archbishop Cordileone announced in May 2022 that Pelosi had been prohibited from the Eucharist, he made clear that his decision came at the end of a lengthy pastoral effort.

Cordileone’s public statements explained that he had made repeated efforts to meet with Pelosi, after she “vowed to codify the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in federal law.”

“That is why I communicated my concerns to you via letter on April 7, 2022, and informed you there that, should you not publicly repudiate your advocacy for abortion ‘rights’ or else refrain from referring to your Catholic faith in public and receiving Holy Communion, I would have no choice but to make a declaration, in keeping with canon 915, that you are not to be admitted to Holy Communion,” the archbishop explained in a letter to Pelosi, which was published online.

Sources close to Cordileone told The Pillar that the archbishop had attempted several times in early 2022 to meet with Pelosi because he had hoped to avoid a public confrontation, and because he hoped that a conversation with her might change her mind.

But when that didn’t happen, Cordileone decided that: “the time [had] now come.”

“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.

Pelosi made little recognition of Cordileone’s decision when it was announced, even after numerous American bishops said they supported it.

But sources have confirmed that the congresswoman did engage a canonist soon after the decision was announced, and began the process of a hierarchical recourse against Cordileone’s decision, initiated first with the Archdiocese of San Francisco.

Pelosi’s office has not responded to a request for information about the process.

Sources close to the dicastery have told The Pillar that the case is pending at the Dicastery for Divine Worship, which has communicated with the San Francisco archdiocese about the recourse.

—
A prohibition against Holy Communion is not a penalty, and thus does not require the exacting procedural minutiae of a trial or administrative penal process.

Instead, a bishop must be satisfied that a person so prohibited is persevering obstinately in “manifest grave sin,” despite warnings and exhortations to change paths.

Cordileone, for his part, was careful to document the gravity of her advocacy on abortion policy, and his repeated written warnings, exhortations, and invitations to pastoral dialogues. To the extent that t’s were crossed and i’s dotted, the archbishop made meticulous notes, which according to sources close to the dicastery, were forwarded directly to Rome.

All of that means that procedurally the dicastery is not likely in a position to overturn the case.

While Pope Francis said in 2021 that politicians who advocate for legal protection for abortion separate themselves from the Church’s communion. — and “cannot take communion” — it seems clear that many curial cardinals would not be themselves likely to take up Cordileone’s approach to sacramental discipline.

Cardinal Arthur Roche himself, prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, might not be a fan of the approach Cordileone took with Pelosi.

But without denuding the relevant canonical provisions entirely, and greatly diminishing the disciplinary prerogatives of diocesan bishops, the Vatican has very little legal argument to challenge Cordileone’s decision, or his authority to make it.

Still, it is not likely that a decision affirming his move will be issued by the dicastery soon, because Francis’ Vatican has shown, generally speaking, a reticence to wade in definitively or authoratively on tinderbox ecclesiastical issues affecting the Church’s life.

The pontiff’s curia has instead perfected the art of delay.

While Pope Francis has faced pressure to issue some decision on the question of a female diakonia, the pope has instead launched study committee after study committee — he is nearly always in a position to say that the matter is out for the deliberation of experts.

When controversy flared over teachers in same-sex marriages at an Indiana Catholic high school — and a recourse sat pending in a Vatican dicastery — the pope took a novel route, by sending an emissary to work things out, and letting the issue go formally unresolved for more than five years.

If the Vatican is unwilling to authoratively rule on a dispute between a bishop and the Jesuits — largely because it touches the issue of gay marriage — consider how allergic the pontiff’s curia will be to a deliberative decision in a high-profile case, dealing with abortion, an archbishop, and the country’s most politically powerful woman.

It seems more likely that the curia will urge Cordileone to meet with Pelosi for more pastoral discussion, the congresswoman will demur, and the issue will be left in tension indefinitely.

—
In the meantime, however, Pelosi has disclosed publicly an issue closer to home which Cordileone might face some calls to address. The congresswoman told the National Catholic Reporter that she has regularly received the Eucharist from San Francisco priests — despite their archbishop’s explicit instruction that she not be admitted to the Eucharist.

By most canonical reckonings, Cordileone’s authority on the matter extends mostly to the limits of his territory — since Pelosi is not the subject of an ecclesiastical sanction, it is not within his competence to prohibit her from receiving the Eucharist in other ecclesiastical territories.

But within his territory, he does have the authority to adjudge matters of sacramental discipline. In principle, the archbishop could pursue some canonical consequence for priests in violation of his directive.

But on the whole, Cordileone has seemed to be overtly disciplinarian about his judgment — expressing regret about Pelosi’s circumstance even as he declared it, and expressing hope for conversion, and for dialogue, even this week.

For Pelosi, Cordileone’s view on the matter is apparently unimportant.

Her reception of the Eucharist is “his problem, not mine,” she said this week.

And while her appeal is technically pending, Roman officials seem most likely to let it remain “his problem,” and not allow it to become theirs.

 

https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/will-pelosis-recourse-prompt-vatican