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Media Aim to Rewrite Catholic Teachings after Pelosi Denied Communion

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Archbishop of San Francisco, the Most Reverend Salvatore J. Cordileone leads the prayer of commendation during the funeral Mass of archbishop emeritus and Cardinal William Joseph Cardinal Levada at the Cathedral of Saint Mary in San Francisco, Calif., October 24, 2019. (Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

‘Cordileone’s chief loyalty is not to Christ, but to the cabal of far-right American bishops,’ the San Francisco Examiner editorial board wrote.

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Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we round up reactions to an archbishop’s decision to deny Nancy Pelosi Communion over her support for abortion, take aim at an awful New York magazine cover, and hit more media misses.

Misunderstanding Catholicism

San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone told House speaker Nancy Pelosi last week that she is no longer eligible to receive Communion in the Archdiocese of San Francisco because of her pro-abortion views.

Cordileone explained his decision in a letter to priests, saying that he was not “weaponizing the Eucharist” but simply enforcing church teaching.

“I have been very clear all along, in both my words and my actions, that my motive is pastoral, not political,” he wrote.

And while CatholicVote, a leading Catholic organization in the U.S., said the decision is compatible with church doctrine, that has not stopped the media or political figures from ignoring the teachings of the church to defend the California Democrat.

The San Francisco Examiner’s liberal editorial board accused Cordileone of “punishing” Pelosi, whom the board argues has “consistently fought on the morally right side of these issues,” including abortion, health care, and “funding for the poor,” which it says “right-wing politicians” have voted against.

“Cordileone’s chief loyalty is not to Christ, but to the cabal of far-right American bishops led by Raymond Leo Burke, a Catholic prelate who has led a continual campaign to undermine Pope Francis’ authority,” the board writes.

“We repeat the call for Pope Francis to remove him and replace him with a leader who can unify rather than divide. Cordileone’s radical conservative politics might attract more people to the faith in places like Oklahoma or Texas, but his partisan pomposity will win no converts in San Francisco,” the editorial concludes.

California state Senator Scott Wiener shared the editorial on Twitter and thanked the outlet for “standing up for @SpeakerPelosi & San Francisco values & against our MAGA Archbishop.”

“He has no business being a leader in our city,” he added:

Whoopi Goldberg responded to the situation on The View, claiming that the “abortion rights battle is starting to blur the lines between church and state.”

“The archbishop of San Francisco is calling for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be denied receiving communion because of her pro-choice stance,” she said. “He’s one of the priests who also called for President Biden to be denied sacrament. This is not your job, dude. That is not — you can’t — that is not up to you make that decision.”

Political commentator Lindy Li claimed the move shows that “religious extremists in our country are out of control, absolutely drunk on power.”

Meanwhile, NPR wrote about the archbishop’s decision and demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of an integral part of Catholicism, at first defining Holy Communion as “a ritual practiced in Catholic churches to memorialize the death of Christ, in part by consuming a symbolic meal of bread and wine.” NPR then corrected the piece to say it is a “ritual practiced in Catholic Churches to remember the death of Christ.”

The outlet affixed a correction to the article saying, “An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the Catholic sacrament of communion as a symbolic meal of bread and wine. Catholics believe the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Jesus.”

The coverage of the church shows just one example of how a lack of diversity — as it pertains to religion, ideology, and geography — can create blindspots for the mainstream media in the U.S. As Poynter wrote in 2013, there is no good data on how many Christians are in newsrooms. That article cited a 2007 Pew study that found that just 8 percent of journalists at national publications reported attending worship services weekly.

A Washington Post survey in 2020 found that U.S. political journalists are “overwhelmingly liberal.” Seventy-eight percent of journalists polled by the Post identified with or leaned toward a certain party or ideology. Of those who said they identified with a political party, eight in ten said they were liberal/Democrats.

Headline Fail of the Week

This week, in a “Headline Fail of the Week” first, we’ve chosen a magazine cover to receive our weekly medal of dishonor. New York magazine released a new, hot-pink issue this week with “This Magazine Can Help You Get An Abortion” splashed across the cover in bright yellow letters. The magazine offers a “State-by-State Handbook for Anyone in Need”:

The piece said that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, as a leaked draft majority opinion from the Supreme Court has suggested is possible, there will be “unimaginable suffering.” However, it adds that it is safer and easier to have an abortion “outside the blessing of the law” these days.

The online version of the cover story links to two articles from the magazine that tell readers how to get access to pills needed for a chemical abortion at home and how to use online privacy measures to remain under the government’s radar.

Media Misses

–New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait blasted National Review’s Charlie Cooke for “blaming liberals for Trump and Trumpism,” referring to Charlie’s post: “The Democrats wanted Doug Mastriano, and Now They’ve Got Him.” He misconstrues its argument, and understandably so, as it seems he hasn’t read the piece. Charlie didn’t submit that the money that Josh Shapiro, the Democrats’ candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, spent on making Mastriano his general-election opponent put Mastriano over the top in the GOP gubernatorial primary. In fact, Charlie took pains to write that, “It took Republican primary voters — not scheming Democrats — to choose Mastriano once he was on the ballot. Had those primary voters wanted to, they could (and should) have just said, ‘No.’” His only point was that Shapiro doesn’t get to make the argument that he fears for democracy’s future if Mastriano defeats him, since his revealed preferences demonstrate that he thought putting Mastriano in a position to do so was worth the risk.

-John Harwood of CNN decried the kind of Beltway bubble that causes D.C. residents to believe inflation presents a challenge to real Americans. In other words: You only think inflation is a problem because you were told it was while sipping on your second martini at the Hay-Adams last Tuesday. When will the ruling class start worrying about the real issues affecting our countrymen’s lives?

-At MSNBC, Chris Hayes is worried about the “insidious” ways that pro-Israel advocates spend money to support pro-Israel candidates:

-NPR has launched an HR tip line for employees to tattle tale on coworkers who do not follow the company’s strict mask policy. A memo sent to employees suggested that if a colleague reminds them to wear a mask they should reply, “Thank you!”

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