Whoopi Goldberg has come to the defense of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after the archdiocese in the lawmaker’s hometown of San Francisco said she will no longer be able to receive communion due to her pro-abortion stance as a Catholic.
“This is not your job, dude! You can’t — that is not up to you to make that decision,” Goldberg said during Monday’s episode of The View, Newsweek reports. “You know, what is the saying? It’s kind of amazing. But, you know, what is the point of communion, right? It’s for sinners. It’s for sinners. It’s the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners. How dare you?”
According to Newsweek, Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone claims his decision was “purely pastoral, not political.”
“After numerous attempts to speak with Speaker Pelosi to help her understand the grave evil she is perpetrating, the scandal she is causing, and the danger to her own soul she is risking, I have determined that she is not to be admitted to Holy Communion,” he said in a Twitter announcement on Friday.
Pelosi, a congresswoman for 35 years, has long been an advocate of abortion rights. Cordileone claims she went too far in September when she pushed for the passage of the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2021, which protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy and protects abortion services. The bill was reportedly in response to the passage of a Texas law that prohibits abortions beyond six weeks.
“Every woman, everywhere has the constitutional right to basic health care,” Pelosi said at the time of the House vote, per USA Today. The Texas law “is the most extreme, dangerous abortion ban in half a century, and its purpose is to destroy Roe v. Wade, and even refuses to make exceptions for cases of rape and incest. This ban necessitates codifying Roe v. Wade.”
Pelosi has clashed with Cordileone for nearly a decade. Last year, he targeted the Democrat amid his anti-abortion prayer campaign.
Cordileone maintains that Pelosi is “not to be admitted to Holy Communion unless and until she publicly repudiates her support for abortion ‘rights’ and confesses and receive absolution for her cooperation in this evil in the sacrament of Penance,” according to the report.
Speaking about Pelosi to American Magazine, Cordileone said he “cannot judge her conscience” but noted that he remains “perplexed” about her pro-choice views.
“It’s very tricky as a politician; there are so many issues to balance out and trying to come to some kind of consensus and compromise and all that,” he said. “But to be so aggressively promoting it — that’s not what a devout Catholic does. So I believe in her heart, she feels that way, but there is a disconnect on this issue.”
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