Whoopi Goldberg, who has said that she got six or seven abortions by the age of 25, recently pronounced on The View that San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has no right to bar Nancy Pelosi from receiving Holy Communion. “This is not your job, dude,” Goldberg said. “That is not up to you to make that decision.” Goldberg then shared her musings on Eucharistic theology: “But, you know, what is the point of communion, right? It’s for sinners. It’s the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners. How dare you?”

Goldberg’s pontifications capture perfectly the secular world’s arrogance toward the Catholic Church. Don’t lecture us, secularists say to the Church, even as they lecture the Church on her own affairs. Secularists insist on their own autonomy while encroaching upon the autonomy of the Church.

According to the Church’s own law, it is Cordileone’s “job” to protect the sacrament of Holy Communion. Under the code of canon law, he has not only a right but a duty to prevent the scandalous and sacrilegious reception of Communion by those in a state of grave sin. Pelosi clearly falls into that category. She has supported abortion for decades, not to mention her many other stances at odds with Catholic moral teaching.

Cordileone’s announcement is long overdue. Unfortunately, many of his colleagues are reluctant to follow it. Their long neglect of canon law has empowered those who think like Goldberg and Pelosi. Under their entitled view of Communion, anybody has a right to it, regardless of the Church’s rules. Yes, it is medicine for sinners, but medicine can only work on the living, not the dead. Reception of Communion presupposes repentance. Nancy Pelosi is utterly unrepentant about her promotion of abortion. No sooner had she heard of Justice Alito’s apparent ruling against Roe v. Wade than she sought to codify it in federal law. (READ MORE from George Neumayr: What Would a Post-Roe Landscape Really Look Like?)

Cordileone owes no one an apology, least of all bumptious secularists who crow about their own infallibility and independence while intruding upon the Church. Who crowned Whoopi Goldberg pope? That checkered figures like her feel free to lecture the Church is a sick parody — one, alas, made possible by decades of laxity within the Church. Recent history makes this much clear: either the Church controls her own sacraments or her enemies will.