Earlier today, we reported on Nancy Pelosi’s gleeful response to the letter from Luis Ladaria, SJ to the US Bishops Conference, in which the term ‘prochoice’ was used.
Pelosi evidently took the letter as being indicative of support for her pro abortions position, amongst the most extreme in the United States.
Now, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has responded to Pelosi’s claims that she was ‘pleased’ with the letter. His response is very strong and certainly pulls no punches:
We must never lose sight of this fact: in the last 50 years, in the United States alone, 66,000,000 babies have been murdered in their mothers’ wombs. This is not a matter about which one can use judgment. It is a fact. 66,000,000 babies murdered in their mothers’ wombs. If we look around us and see what is happening in our society today, we will see that this fact once again demonstrates that violence begets violence. 66,000,000 babies murdered in their mothers’ wombs. The response to a woman in a crisis pregnancy is not violence, but love.
It is for this reason that I’m happy to know that Speaker Pelosi said she is pleased with the letter of Cardinal Ladaria, Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to Archbishop Gómez, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, regarding the issue of Catholics prominent in public life who advocate for practices that are gravely evil. In that letter, Cardinal Ladaria advises the U.S. bishops to use as a guide in discerning how to address this situation the principles laid out in a private letter in 2004 from the then-Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the CDF at the time, to the bishops of the United States.
In his letter, Ratzinger confirmed that consistently advocating for abortion and euthanasia constitutes formal cooperation in grave sin, and that bishops must dialogue with Catholics prominent in public life who do so in order to help them understand the grave evil they are helping to perpetrate and accompany them to a change of heart. He goes on to say in that letter that, if these dialogues prove to be fruitless, then, out of respect for the Catholic belief of what it means to receive Holy Communion, the bishop must declare that the individual is not be admitted to Communion. Speaker Pelosi’s positive reaction to Cardinal Ladaria’s letter, then, raises hope that progress can be made in this most serious matter.