The Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, told a June 16 news conference that she is “a very Catholic person and I believe in every woman’s right to make her own decisions.”

Pelosi was being questioned about her support for legal abortion, which has led San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone to bar her from Communion. She declined to state her own view on the morality of abortion, but said that Church teaching “is not necessarily what public policy should be in the United States.”