This is what we have come to: a reporter watching a livestream of Mass to see if someone goes to Communion.
From RNS:
Two days after Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco announced he would bar her from receiving the Eucharist in her home city due to her stance on abortion rights, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly received the sacrament at a Catholic church in the nation’s capital.
According to Politico’s Playbook, Pelosi received Communion on Sunday (May 22) during Mass at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown, a parish where President Joe Biden has also attended services. Footage from the church’s livestream of the service shows a person in an orange jacket resembling Pelosi coming forward as the Eucharist is being distributed and walking away behind other worshippers.
It’s not unusual for Pelosi, a Catholic who often discusses her faith, to attend Mass, but her decision to receive the Eucharist at Holy Trinity amounted to a rebuke of Cordileone, who is well known for his conservative and sometimes controversial views.
According to the Rev. John Beal, a canon lawyer and professor at the Catholic University of America, Cordileone’s ban is not believed to affect Pelosi’s ability to take Communion outside of churches under the archbishop’s purview.
“It applies only to ministers, ordained and non-ordained, in the Archdiocese of San Francisco,” Beal told Religion News Service in an email, noting that it applies to diocesan leaders as well as those who belong to a religious order. “It does not apply outside the Archdiocese.”
… The Rev. Benjamin Hawley, a priest at Holy Trinity, mentioned the back-and-forth over abortion and Communion in his Sunday homily, wrapping his sermon around a theme of God’s love. Hawley singled out three things he described as “weapons of mass destruction” that are “destroying our civic and church cultures” — exclusion, repression and scorn.
