Nancy Pelosi in trouble with the church

Everett WA

Description

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of the Archdiocese of San Francisco recently made a decision that some, both inside and outside of the Roman Catholic Church, are finding controversial. Relying heavily on the canons of the church, he wrote a letter addressed to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) advising her she was ineligible to receive Holy Communion (aka the Eucharist) within the diocese because of her stance on abortion. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), who is similarly banned from the sacred practice within the archdiocese of Springfield, Illinois, has jumped to her defense. Both of the self-professed Catholic, and liberal politicians take the position that conservative bishops don’t have the right to take this action in what is a matter of individual conscience. The senator had said he thinks “it’s fundamentally unfair.” Bishop Cordileone referred to a document called a doctrinal note, which said that it’s morally wrong for Catholic politicians to support abortion rights and laws that make them legal. He then invoked Canon 915 of the church law, which says those “who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin” should be refused the rite of the Eucharist. The question becomes, is the bishop correct in his application of one of the founding principles of the Roman Catholic Church, or is the more liberal branch right when they say it is up to each parishioner to decide? I have to wonder if Nancy Pelosi goes to church every Sunday and receives the Holy Communion. The ominous snuffing out of candles in the medieval liturgy evokes the spiritual darkness that those dismissed from the Church’s communion enter. But to understand what excommunication is, we should not focus principally on this darkness. Darkness is not the point, at least for the Church’s pastors. Light is the point. While excommunication excludes a Catholic from many of the Church’s spiritual goods, its purpose in fact is to encourage conversion, the excommunicate’s return to the light of truth and the communion of grace. Given that excommunication has been in the news lately, it might be helpful to review just what excommunication is and the purpose that it serves today in the life of the Church. On the one hand, an excommunication can be incurred automatically. This is what canon law calls a latae sententiae excommunication. In these cases, the law itself passes the sentence of guilt. An automatic excommunication is attached to what the Church considers very serious ecclesiastical crimes: apostasy, heresy, and schism; throwing away the Sacred Body or Precious Blood of Christ or retaining either for a sacrilegious purpose; the use of physical force against the pope; a priest’s absolution of someone who is the priest’s accomplice in a sin against the sixth commandment (the absolution itself is invalid); a bishop’s consecration of another bishop without a pontifical mandate; a confessor’s direct violation of the seal of confession; the procuring of a completed abortion; and the recording and/or the subsequent divulging of the recording of a sacramental confession. In these cases, the sinner excommunicates himself simply by virtue of a grave act that he freely chooses to perform. The Church recognizes, of course, that there can be circumstances that limit a person’s ability to incur an automatic excommunication, for instance if a person commits an ecclesiastical crime through ignorance or coercion. If an automatic excommunication is in fact incurred, however, it at first remains undeclared; it can only be declared—made official and public—at the conclusion of an official investigation by the Church.