Archbishop slams Pelosi & Biden over pro-abortion politics: ‘Especially disturbing’
Dani Repass
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In an op-ed published on Sunday, the Catholic archbishop of San Francisco pushed back against comments made by pro-abortion Catholics like President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone also urged other Catholics to push back against similarly pro-abortion politicians.
“I find it especially disturbing that so many of the politicians on the wrong side of the preeminent human rights issue of our time are self-professed Catholics,” Archbishop Cordileone wrote. “President Biden announced a “whole-of-government effort” to find ways to overcome the Texas [abortion] measure. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…promised new legal action: ‘This ban necessitates codifying Roe v. Wade’ in federal law.”
Cordileone then emphasized the “perennial challenge” that bishops in the United States face – whether or not to get involved in the subject of abortion.
“This is a perennial challenge for bishops in the United States: This summer, we provoked an uproar by discussing whether public officials who support abortion should receive the sacrament of the Eucharist. We were accused of inappropriately injecting religion into politics, of butting in where we didn’t belong,” Cordileone wrote.
“I see matters differently,” he wrote. Cordileone then described looking at the country’s “last great human rights movement,” which is still within his living memory, “for inspiration on how we should respond.”
Cordileone then adduced the example of New Orleans Archbishop Joseph Rummel, who “did not stay in his lane,” and admitted two Black students to New Orleans’s Notre Dame Seminary. After that, Cordileone says Rummel in 1951 ordered the removal of “white” and “colored” signs from Catholic churches. Then, in 1953, Rummel ordered an end to segregation throughout the archdiocese of New Orleans. He once closed a church for refusing to accept a Black priest, and in March 1962, he formally announced the end of segregation in the New Orleans Catholic Schools.
“Unlike several other bishops throughout this country’s history, he did not prioritize keeping parishioners and the public happy above advancing racial justice. Instead, he began a long, patient campaign of moral suasion to change the opinions of pro-segregation White Catholics,” Cordileone wrote of Rummel.
“Was that wrong? Was that weaponizing the Eucharist?” Cordileone asks, referencing Rummel’s eventual excommunication of segregationists. “No. Rummel recognized that prominent, high-profile public advocacy for racism was scandalous: It violated core Catholic teachings and basic principles of justice, and also led others to sin.”
Cordileone wrote that abortion similarly violates Catholic teachings.
“In our own time, what could be a more egregious “denial of the unity and solidarity of the human race” than abortion? Abortion kills a unique, irreplaceable human being growing in his or her mother’s womb,” Cordileone wrote. “Everyone who advocates for abortion, in public or private life, who funds it or who presents it as a legitimate choice participates in a great moral evil.
Cordileone concluded his opinion piece by telling Catholics: “You cannot be a good Catholic and support expanding a government-approved right to kill innocent human beings. The answer to crisis pregnancies is not violence but love, for both mother and child.”
“This is hardly inappropriate for a pastor to say. If anything, Catholic political leaders’ response to the situation in Texas highlights the need for us to say it all the louder.”