By DEXTER DUGGAN
You have a good friend who’s going downhill with an addiction, or running with a bad crowd. You can see how it’s hurting her but you’ve avoided mentioning it because you know she snapped at other people or stalked away as soon as they raised the topic.
When she keeps suffering this way, is it really kindness for you to act as if nothing’s wrong? If she walked into quicksand but won’t ask for help because she thinks that would be an embarrassing admission she can’t read a map, would you let her keep sinking?
U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) seems increasingly troubled when she’s asked about permissive abortion. San Franciscan Pelosi knows that Democratic Party powerhouses demand that she genuflect to it, and she does, but she also knows that the Catholic faith she claims to revere holds this to be a grave moral violation.
So she tries to split the baby issue in half by being two-faced. Which leaves the babies fully dead, not just half dead.
Pelosi ducks the abortion question but says by rote that she’s a devout Catholic mother of five, all born in quick succession. Stressing not only the number of pregnancies but also their being unspaced apparently is intended as irrefutable evidence that she’s such a submissive Catholic, she obediently had the babies one right after another.
So, the line of argument seems to go, how could anyone question her fidelity to Catholic teaching? Never mind that she can’t square this circle.
Pelosi’s manner becomes abrupt, aloof, and dismissive. It’s no kindness to allow her to continue suffering this way while she futilely tries to rationalize for herself.
She’s troubled, but the bad crowd she runs with and the ideological addictions they indulge, people in politics and the media, cheer her on. Meanwhile, no ecclesiastical authority publicly insists directly to her that she must stop claiming to be a faithful, practicing Catholic while remaining unrepentant.
On October 1, when conservative reporter Sam Dorman, of CNSNews.com, raised the issue of babies’ lives, Pelosi cut him off sharply. She seemed more abrupt than she had been in mid-2013, when a different writer raised a rather similar question.
Dorman asked: “In reference to funding for Planned Parenthood: Is an unborn baby with a human heart and a human liver a human being?”
Pelosi began by trying to wave away his inquiry as “your ideological questions,” CNSNews.com reported. The reporter pressed, “If it’s not a human being, what species is it?”
Still ducking the question while bringing out what she apparently regarded as her heavy artillery, Pelosi snapped:
“No, listen, I want to say something to you. I don’t know who you are and you’re welcome to be here, freedom of this press. I am a devout, practicing Catholic, a mother of five children. When my baby was born, my fifth child, my oldest child was six years old. I think I know more about this subject than you, with all due respect.”
When Dorman tried to continue, Pelosi cut him off: “And I do not intend to respond to your questions, which have no basis in what public policy is that we do here.”
Can’t someone extend a saving hand to this writhing woman by calling on her to reform? The immediate authority would be her own San Francisco archbishop, Salvatore Cordileone.
In June 2013, reporter John McCormack, of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, drew Pelosi’s attention to the contemporary Kermit Gosnell case, where an abortionist was tried for homicide in Philadelphia because he sometimes killed babies even after delivering them alive.
What was the difference, McCormack asked, with an abortionist who killed a late-pregnancy baby before she could be born alive? The reporter referenced a House bill to restrict permissive abortion to 20 weeks.
Strangely, Pelosi began by saying McCormack was “enjoying” and “savoring” his question, then she refused to answer. She inexplicably said Gosnell’s behavior was equally as reprehensible as restricting such abortions, then she immediately tried to drop the topic.
“Let me just tell you this,” Pelosi said. “What was done in Philadelphia was reprehensible and everybody condemned it. For them to decide to disrespect a judgment a woman makes about her reproductive health is reprehensible. Next question.”
When McCormack tried to ask about the difference between killing a baby before and after birth at the same age, Pelosi cut him off and falsely claimed that the 20-week House bill allowed no exception for any abortion.
Having refused to answer McCormack’s question, Pelosi incredibly accused him of not wanting to have an answer. She then played what she regarded as her winning card:
“I’ve responded to you to the extent that I’m going to respond to you. Because I want to tell you something. As the mother of five children, my oldest child was six years old the day I brought my fifth child home from the hospital. As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this. I don’t think it should have anything to do with politics. And that’s where you’re taking it, and I’m not going there.”
Her nerves seemed less frayed a few years earlier, in 2008, when she tried to maneuver through related questions. Her conscience apparently has become increasingly stressed as her self-deceptions weigh on her.
In 2008, Pelosi, saying she was speaking as an ardent Catholic, erroneously told television interviewers that the Catholic Church’s abortion stand was uncertain, or had been decided only in the last few decades. By 2013 she simply was refusing to answer and instead cited her multiple maternities.
Garbled Syntax
The Wanderer asked two Catholic commentators for their observations on Pelosi’s current distress.
Blogger Brad Miner emailed on October 9:
“When Mrs. Pelosi says she knows more than a male reporter about having babies — she had five in six years — she’s surely right, but when she says the question of when human life begins has no basis in public policy, she is just as surely wrong. When she asserts that she’s a ‘devout, practicing Catholic,’ she’s sinfully wrong.
“Although her garbled syntax sometimes makes her seem, well, like an idiot, I doubt she really is, which means she knows full well how at odds her stance on abortion is with the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. And we know she knows it, because several bishops have taken her aside and counseled her, even warned her,” Miner continued.
“Although this is a matter of canon law, and although I’m not a canon lawyer, I will say again what I’ve said before: Nancy Pelosi causes scandal every time she makes these serial pronouncements coupling support for abortion and her Catholic faith, and it’s time a formal process to consider her excommunication was begun,” Miner concluded.
Miner is senior editor of The Catholic Thing online, senior fellow at the Faith & Reason Institute, and a board member of Aid to the Church in Need USA.
Mortal Sins
Barbara Simpson, a Catholic commentator around the San Francisco Bay area, knows Pelosi’s record up close. Noting how Pelosi handled the CNSNews.com reporter’s questions on October 1, Simpson told The Wanderer:
“The problem with that is that she didn’t answer the question, and that’s because this self-identified, ‘pat-me-on-the-back,’ devout, practicing Catholic is a firm supporter of issues that her Church considers mortal sins: contraception, abortion, homosexuality and gay marriage — to name just a few.
“People in the San Francisco Bay area, which is her congressional district, are familiar with Pelosi’s response,” Simpson emailed on October 10. “She rolls it out with regularity and says it vehemently,” essentially challenging anyone to dare question her because of her asserted religious devotion and her five children born in six years.
“Think about it,” Simpson said. “When was the last time you ever heard a dyed-in-the-wool, progressive Democrat using the Catholic Church as a defense for their political positions? How about ‘never’?
“Nancy Pelosi is not only a cradle Catholic, she is a cradle progressive Democrat, but she’s also a cradle cafeteria Catholic and, as a result, gets away with such an insulting line of defensive nonsense to avoid telling the truth,” she said.
“If she really is so devout, I wonder how long her Confessions are. No doubt, she needs to make an appointment for them. People like her give Catholicism a bad name. She’s a mirror image of hypocrisy,” Simpson concluded.
Perhaps people like Pelosi refuse to face the facts of permissive abortion because they know they’d be shocked into reforming their lives — like the five Planned Parenthood abortuary workers in an August 7, 2014, LifeSiteNews.com story who all left their jobs after seeing the results of a medication abortion on quadruplets in the second trimester.
One of the workers reportedly emailed to Abby Johnson, a former PP clinic director turned pro-lifer, to describe her shock at seeing two of the dead baby boys with their arms “wrapped around each other. . . .
“I remember sobbing with a co-worker as we sorted through the remains of the fourth baby boy in the POC (products of conception) lab,” the abortuary worker wrote. “We cradled the tiny intact babies in our arms and cried for them. I knew that I could no longer do this work. I was done.”
Johnson reportedly said the incident illustrated the need for healing for former abortion-industry employees.
The same applies to people like Pelosi, who sound increasingly desperate as they race into dark recesses, to cloud their consciences more.
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