U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican Wednesday morning, but may not have had a meeting of the minds if the two statements from their offices are any indication.
No journalists were at the 15-minute encounter and the Vatican and the speaker’s offices have not released any photos. However, according to their statements it appears the pope and the politician attended two different get-togethers.
“His Holiness took the opportunity to speak of the requirements of the natural moral law and the Church’s consistent teaching on the dignity of human life from conception to natural death which enjoins all Catholics, and especially legislators, jurists and those responsible for the common good of society, to work in cooperation with all men and women of good will in creating a just system of laws capable of protecting human life at all stages of its development,” the Vatican wrote, having released the statement moments before the two met.
Several hours later, Pelosi’s office gave her take on the tete-a-tete.
Why doesn’t she just jettison her “cultural Catholicism” and swim
toward a more accommodating shore ( e.g. TEC ) ? She certainly
won’t convert Benedict to her views. As for being in a verbal
slugfest with Catholic bishops last year, how did she dodge a
similar slugfest with the bishops’ boss ?
This is the prime contender for most obvious headline of 2009-an early leader!
it must be so exhausting for Pelosi to have to educate all these ignorant bishops about the church’s teaching……
[i] Please limit sarcasm and negative one liners. [/i]
Elf Lady
I think that the Pope has higher approval numbers (by far) than she – not that it matters much.
And no meeting of the minds? No meeting of spirits, either, I would guess.
Don
It sounds like the Pope gave Pelosi some stern words in person, and you really can’t expect her to put that in her own statement. If she’s a serious Catholic, perhaps she’ll take his words to heart. We should pray that might be so.
One of the comments following the article struck a note for me. Someone suggested that the Church ought to stay out of the government’s business. I assume then, that anyone who takes their faith seriously, and their role in the church as a calling, is therefore disqualified. And yet, we still have to pay taxes. I didn’t care to register in order to respond, but it seems to me that many of the moral/ethical challenges the USA faces are due to the notion that the government is seperate from, and over, the people of the nation. As I recall, it is a government of the people, by the people and for the people. If it ever becomes an entity separate and above the people it serves, it then will become nothing more than another monster to slay.
I apologize, elflady, and would expand my thoughts, hopefuilly devoid of sarcasm.
I am amazed that Ms. Pelosi has the gall to inform the leaders of her church that they do not understand the church’s teaching but she does. I am amazed that she does not see how presumptive it is to speak in this manner without humility. I think she is an exemplar of what was called Modernism and Americanism at the turn of the last century. She is self defining what it means to be a Roman Catholic.
She has also made the following comments (April interview with Catholic News Service): “…she hoped the U.S. bishops would not use the refusal of holy Communion as a way of punishing Catholic politicians who don’t heed church teachings on abortion. ‘Think of that word Communion, that which brings us all together as Christians, as Catholics,’ Pelosi said. Denying a Catholic the Eucharist ‘would be something that would shatter that union,’ she said.”
Ummm, well yeah, Nancy, that’s pretty much the point! By your actions you’ve already placed yourself outside the communion of believers; you’ve already created a breach between yourself and the church. Denying you reception of the Eucharist would just be an honest recognition of that.
Her sacramental theology is just as bad as her moral theology.
Why is the Speaker of the House meeting with the Pope…and any other foreign leaders for that matter? I suppose I should count my blessing she’s not in DC anyway.
Does anyone know if any Catholic bishops have actually instructued priests to deny Holy Communion to any notoriously pro-abortion Catholic legislators, and if the priests have carried out these instructions? If not, starting with Pelosi would be a great way to send the message that the Catholic Church is serious about this issue.
[i] Why is the Speaker of the House meeting with the Pope…and any other foreign leaders for that matter? [/i]
Well, for one thing, because she is following precedents that go back at least six decades.
After World War II, both major U.S. political parties responded to the disastrous isolationism of the 1920s and 1930s by encouraging contacts between congressional leaders and foreign leaders.
Jeff (#9),
It’s a little hard to connect the nineteenth century Americanists with Nancy Pelosi, when I suspect they would have had as little time for her as you do. I realize that you may simply be rephrasing the old line about there being no such thing as a new heresy, but I would be cautious about equating dissent from the First Vatican Council with contemporary cafeteria Catholicism.
[url=http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com]Catholic and Reformed[/url]
OK. I obviously meant #8. Apologies.
#11 Bishop Paul Loverde of the Diocese of Arlington Virginia has told several “leading” Catholic politicians not to present themselves for Holy Communion so that there would be no “embarassing situation during church.”
In the gospel account, Satan presents to Jesus the kingdoms
of this world in all their pomp and power. Satan promises to hand
these over if Jesus will only fall down and worship him (Satan). As
Muggeridge and others have pointed out, that sort of power is the
devil’s gift. This is strikingly apparent in the meeting between
the pope and Pelosi. “If only you will fall down and worship abortion
and gay marriage …”
I wish this “ardent, practicing Catholic” was as interested in the welfare of women who are oppressed by Sharia Law as she is interested in helping women who desire to have abortions.
It seems to me that, from the article’s description of Pelosi stating she [i]and her husband[/i] were pleased to have an audience with the Pope and show him photos of their [i]children and grandchildren[/i], she may have in effect been saying to him, look, I’ve done my Catholic duty as a woman, marrying and multiplying as Genesis commands. She may think that with all that testimony to her obedience, she as an adult American woman is therefore entitled to ignore whatever else the Church may teach or attempt to hold her to. I’m just supposing. If only women like her would understand that true courage is shown in encouraging the next generation to be obedient to one’s religious teachings, rather than by working to use the political system to evade or replace one’s religious teachings……
I think if she were honest she would cease to self-identify as an authentic Catholic – along with Vice-President Biden, many of the Kennedy family, etc…….
George Weigel accounts for the difference in an NRO article:
“….Pelosi, who shamelessly trumpets her “ardent†Catholicism while leading congressional Democrats in a continuing assault on what the Catholic Church regards as the inalienable human rights of the unborn, was trying to recruit Benedict XVI (“Joseph Ratzinger, D., Bavariaâ€?) to Team Nancy.
His Holiness wasn’t buying it.
He told Pelosi, politely but unmistakably, that her relentlessly pro-abortion politics put her in serious difficulties as a Catholic, which was his obligation as a pastor. He also underscored — for Pelosi, Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Barbara Mikulski, Rose DeLauro, Kathleen Sebelius, and everyone else — that the Church’s opposition to the taking of innocent human life, at any stage of the human journey, is not some weird Catholic hocus-pocus; it’s a first principle of justice than can be known by reason. It is a “requirement of the natural moral law†— that is, the moral truths we can know by thinking about what is right and what is wrong — to defend the inviolability of innocent human life. You don’t have to believe in papal primacy to know that; you don’t have do believe in seven sacraments, or the episcopal structure of the Church, or the divinity of Christ, to know that. You don’t even have to believe in God to know that. You only have to be a morally serious human being, willing to work through a moral argument — which, of course, means being the kind of person who understands that moral truth cannot be reduced to questions of feminist political correctness or partisan political advantage.
As her performance on Meet the Press prior to last year’s Democratic national convention made painfully clear, Pelosi is deeply confused about what her church teaches on the morality of abortion, and why. She may have come to her bizarre views on her own; it’s far more likely that she has been un-catechized, so to speak, by Catholic intellectuals and clerics who find Catholic teaching on life issues an embarrassment among their high-minded friends and colleagues of the progressive persuasion. Whatever the source of her confusion, Pelosi has now been informed, and by a world-class intellectual who happens to be the universal pastor of the Catholic Church, that she is, in fact, confused, and that both her spiritual life and her public service are in jeopardy because of that.”
I suppose she would like to think of him as a Democrat from Bavaria. Frankly I find it a bit easier to imagine him as a Republican from, say, Dallas, recalling the letter he sent to the Anglican meeting in Dallas a few years ago.
She then added that the Church has only held the view for 50 years or so that life begins at conception.
Untrue, of course. Either Ms. Pelosi knows it and is a liar, or she doesn’t, which makes her shamefully ignorant. Since she made her remarks last summer, even the most laodicean of American Catholic bishops have publicly corrected her. More to the point, her own bishop, Abp. Niederauer, invited her to meet with him for a pastoral discussion of the issue. As of Feb. 13th, she hadn’t found time to see her bishop.
The scandal began with Teddy Kennedy in Boston 30 years ago and continues in San Francisco today.
She knew. It was a pathetic attempt to justify her own views and votes and comments (“If the government provides contraception and abortion that will be better for America, because there will be less people being born and that means less people needing Government assistance”).
She didn’t listen to the bishops, and now she makes it clear she will not listen to the Pope himself! What kind of Catholic is she? And, more importantly, why does she remain a member of the Catholic Church?
Nancy Pelosi probably thinks that liberals can take over Vatican theology, with regard to abortion, as easily as liberals took over the theology of the Episcopal church. After all it seems that it was very easy for the RCRC (Religious Cooalition for Reproductive Choice) to enlist TEC as a full, functioning member of their lobbying organization without even letting church members know about it or asking for their approval. Pelosi may just see herself as a first step in that process.
Normally, posters here are big fans of the 39 Articles. However, since this story allows the assembled here at T19 to bash someone they don’t like and to become allies of the pope, Article 37 (which includes “The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.”) doesn’t get much talked about.
Joseph Ratzinger is a man, like anyone else. He’s probably delighted to have the headlines change the subject from his recent boneheaded decision to rehabilitate Holocaust-deniers. But that’s why he’s so popular on this site: authority and obedience trump any other considerations.
Apparently, herself did meet with her archbishop. I stand corrected.