You Can't Fix Stupid

 Washington D.C., Jan 27, 2021 / 01:30 pm MT (CNA).- In an interview discussing his recent admonition of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco emphasized the need for Catholics to recover the sense of worthiness to receive Holy Communion.

“Catholics no longer understand the idea of worthiness to receive Communion. It’s just seen as a sort of a token gesture of welcome and belonging,” Cordileone told EWTN Pro-Life Weekly in an interview that will air on Thursday night.

The archbishop was addressing the topic of denial of Holy Communion to someone “for the sake of their soul.” He said that Catholics must first understand the Church’s teaching on the Eucharist in order to grasp the significance of the denial of Holy Communion to a public figure.

“For that kind of action [denial of Communion] to make sense to a lot of people, we need to reclaim this sense of what it means to receive [Communion],” Cordileone said, pointing to a lack of belief in the Real Presence of the Eucharist among Catholics.

“What are you really saying when you receive Communion? To me, it goes hand-in-hand with this decline in the belief of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist,” he said.

Archbishop Cordileone was explaining to EWTN his Jan. 21 statement to Speaker Pelosi, a Catholic who hails from the San Francisco archdiocese.

Noted Theologian Nancy Pelosi

In that statement, Cordileone had said that “No Catholic in good conscience can favor abortion,” referring to Pelosi’s public support in Congress for legal abortion.

Pelosi, on a Jan. 18 podcast with former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, had referred to the issue of abortion as “a woman’s right to choose” and said that Catholics should “love contraception” for reducing the abortion rate.