At her press briefing last week, a rather testy Pelosi told CNS News that Obama’s effort to force even employers with religious objections to pay for contraceptive measures including sterilization and the Morning After Pill for their employees was “courageous” and that she was “going to stick with” her “fellow Catholics in supporting the administration on this."
“We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law,” wrote Florida Archbishop Thomas Wenski in a letter posted on the Miami Archdiocese website and read at all parishes in response to President Barack Obama’s “courageous” act.
“We ask you to join with us and others inside and outside our community of faith,” states a January 25 post on the website of St. Margaret’s of the Diocese of Pensacola, “to resist and reverse this appalling decision that threatens our freedom.”
Following Obama’s awkward walk-back on Friday, which now forces the employer's insurance provider to pick up the tab -- an expense which will ultimately be paid by the employer when their premiums rise to account for the forced expense -- Pelosi was quoted by ABC News saying that she appreciates the president's “unifying approach as we work to ensure that the American people continue to receive the benefits of health care reform."
While President Barack Obama is still feeling the heat over his contentious contraception mandate, this is far from being Pelosi’s first swim in the font of holy hot water.
"I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time," the National Catholic Register documented the misinformed Pelosi pontificating during her 2008 interview with NBC's Meet the Press moderator Tom Brokaw regarding a question of when life begins. "And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the Church have not been able to make that definition."
While NCR also recounted a report by The Hill wherein president of Catholics for Choice Jon O’Brien defended Pelosi -- saying she “was correct in noting that Catholic teaching has changed over the years, even on the issue of when life begins” -- five bishops, three archbishops and two cardinals issued immediate statements stating that Pelosi was wrong.
New York Cardinal Edward Egan went so far as to say that “anyone who dares to defend” that one human being “may be legitimately killed because another human being ‘chooses’ to do so -- should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name.”
Of “Ms. Pelosi’s attempt to justify the unjustifiable,” then Bishop Thomas Wenski of the Orlando Diocese excoriated Pelosi on Priest for Life, “No one can legitimately argue that support for abortion can be reconciled with the moral teachings of the Church.”
"I practically mourn this difference of opinion,” Pelosi lamented to Newsweek in 2010, “because I feel what I was raised to believe is consistent with what I profess, and that is that we are all endowed with, a free will and a responsibility to answer for our actions.”
When asked whether Pelosi should be denied communion due to her continued public pro-abortion stance, Life Site News quoted Kentucky Bishop Gainer saying that the Church had been “patient enough” with Pelosi and that “something should be done.”
Last week, John Zuhlsdorf (aka Fr. Z) -- one of the web’s most prominent priest-bloggers – was the first to call on Archbishop George Niederauer of San Francisco and Cardinal Donald Wuerl to invoke canon 915, which states that those who have been “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.”
“For the good of souls,” Zuhlsdorf, aka Fr. Z, wrote on his blog Tuesday, “Nancy Pelosi must be denied Holy Communion and the Catholic people should be informed that she is being denied Holy Communion.”
Zuhlsdorf received immediate support from leading canon lawyer Dr. Edward Peters. Peters, who holds the Edmund Cardinal Szoka Chair at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit and serves as a consultant to the Vatican’s highest court, made clear on his Light of the Law blog that Pelosi’s repeated defiance of Catholic doctrine defines the best case for applying canon 915 in the United States.
“If her prolonged public conduct does not qualify as obstinate perseverance in manifest grave sin, then, in all sincerity, I must admit to not knowing what would constitute obstinate perseverance in manifest grave sin,” he wrote in 2010.
“It’s now February of 2012,” Peters opined Tuesday, “and nothing in Pelosi’s conduct over the last 23 months suggests any emendation of her attitudes toward killing unborn babies” and “her recent call for Catholics qua Catholics to unite behind, of all things, President Obama’s plan to impose immoral policies on private medical insurance plans suggests that Pelosi’s views, like Pharaoh’s heart, have only hardened with time.”
Considering Pelosi’s “views” and her extensive history of contradicting the teachings of the Catholic Church, perhaps it’s time for her to confess that she does not “practically mourn this difference of opinion” but is absolutely determined to force the Catholic Church to conform to her opinion.
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