Pelosi Meeting Pope?

(photo: CNS/Reuters)

The Italian news agency ANSA reports today that U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is expected to have an audience with Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday.

Pelosi, who is Catholic, has been Italy since Saturday on a six-day trip to that country.

The ANSA report echoes the rumor about the possible meeting with Benedict that was reported last week by The Washington Post.

Neither the Vatican nor Pelosi’s Washington office has confirmed that the meeting will take place. The Daily Blog contacted her office by phone today seeking confirmation, but the office is closed for the President’s Day holiday.

If the meeting does take place, it should not be expected that the Pope will use the occasion to criticize how Pelosi has failed dismally to live up to her responsibility as a Catholic politician to defend human life, because of her strong pro-abortion advocacy. That’s not the way the Vatican normally handles papal meetings with politicians who act this way.

But a meeting with the Holy Father inevitably will draw lots of attention to Pelosi’s repeated failures in this regard. Go herehere, here, here, here, and here for a sampling of some of the Register’s coverage of Pelosi’s consistent failure to uphold Church teachings in this fundamental area of faith and morals since she became Speaker in 2007.

In a spirit of helpfulness, we will again offer for Pelosi’s perusal the instruction regarding the absolute requirement for all people to oppose abortion and other similar attacks on innocent and defenceless human life, as stated in Pope John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life):

“Abortion and euthanasia are thus crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws; instead there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection … In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it” (no. 73).