Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco has become the latest American bishop to advocate barring Catholic public figures who support abortion rights [1] from communion, as debate on the topic continues to grow since President Joe Biden, the country’s second Catholic president and a pro-choice Democrat, took office.
Cordileone’s letter is also significant because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another pro-choice Catholic Democrat, resides in the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
“Our responsibility to the rest of the Catholic community is to assure them that the Church of Jesus Christ does take most seriously her mission to care for ‘the least of these,’ as Our Lord has commanded us, and to correct Catholics who erroneously, and sometimes stubbornly, promote abortion,” wrote Cordileone.
“This correction takes several forms and rightly begins with private conversations between the erring Catholic and his or her parish priest or bishop,” he continued. “Because we are dealing with public figures and public examples of cooperation in moral evil, this correction can also take the public form of exclusion from the reception of Holy Communion.”