It should come as no surprise that "ardent Catholic" Nancy Pelosi is once again at odds with a bishop.  This time, the disagreement is with her local shepherd, archbishop of San Francisco Salvatore Joseph Cordileone.  The archbishop has started to complain publicly at the way California's lockdown rules are specifically aimed at keeping houses of worship shuttered, and he wants his churches re-opened.  Pelosi, on the basis of no scientific evidence at all, says that because it's not yet "scientifically safe" for people to attend Mass in person, it will be "jeopardizing people's health" to follow Archbishop Cordileone's rash counsel.  "With all due respect to my archbishop," Pelosi says, "I think we should follow science on this."  But the archbishop hasn't got any problem with science.  He just wants an answer to one parishioner's question: "I can spend three hours indoors in Nordstrom, why can't I go to Mass indoors?"

Speaker Pelosi is entitled to correct her bishop because, if it's possible, she's an even more dedicated Woman of Science than she is an adherent of the Catholic faith.  It's thanks to her profound mastery of both science and Christian teaching that she's able to know exactly when to listen to one and flatly ignore the other, since, as she explains, "faith and science, sometimes they're countered to each other."  Even if centuries of devout believers smarter than her would argue that the Christian faith and science can never be in opposition (because "truth cannot be contrary to truth"), Pelosi is a modern Catholic not trapped in the Dark Ages.  She knows how to keep her deeply held faith in its antiscientific place.  Her real creed is, "I believe in science."

Or at least, science as far as she understands it — which might be almost as far as she understands the faith she consistently misrepresents.  Recall that Pelosi said it was her intense study of the Church's teaching on abortion, undertaken as "an ardent, practicing Catholic," that led her to the astonishingly lazy and lukewarm rationalization that, "over the centuries, the Doctors of the Church have not been able" to define when human life begins.  Could she really have missed with all that study that the Church has always taught that abortion and infanticide are sinful, in documents teaching not to "procure abortion, nor commit infanticide" dating as early as A.D. 65 to 80?

And if "when human life begins" were the real issue for her, then why couldn't she simply "follow the science," which leaves no shred of doubt on the matter? 

Funnily enough, one of the last times Pelosi was in a disagreement with Archbishop Cordileone, he was the one explaining the science to her.  At a press conference on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Pelosi boasted "great standing" to defend abortion, because as a "Catholic and a mom of five," she knows "more about having babies than the pope."  Yet somehow, neither as a mother of five nor with her Ph.D. in Science could she answer a reporter asking if an unborn child at 20 weeks is a "human being."  It took the same Archbishop Cordileone to clarify the "scientific fact that human life begins at conception."  Which one is following the science?

All last year, it was the word "morality" Pelosi was abusing daily, 'til it was nothing but a scrap of hack gibberish.  She anointed herself the supreme arbiter on what is and isn't "moral," condemning in particular the immorality of all laws that protect a national border, or might reduce the slaughter of unborn babies, or otherwise oppose her political goals.  But the cause for her sainthood never caught on, maybe because anyone who appeals to the "basic morality" and even "sacredness" of mothers killing their unborn children doesn't deserve her own feast day.

Now she's dragging "science" through the muck.  Virtually every time she opens her mouth, she's blaming Republicans in general, and President Trump in particular, for all the disasters caused by our "rejection of science."  A few weeks ago, while blaming Trump for, well, every world problem, Pelosi showed her command of the facts: "Let me just say three words about the wildfires, and the hurricanes and about the coronavirus.  Three words.  Science.  Science.  And science.  The science that the administration has chosen to ignore..."

This doesn't say much for Pelosi's math skills, because "science" is only one word. 

We haven't forgotten how often the party of science ignores evidence it doesn't like.  That's what its members have done with climate change and coronavirus, either censoring the other side to the argument or trying to criminalize dissent.  Thanks to science reporting by liberals, the average American thinks 9% of the population has died from the virus — 30 million people.  Progressive science says a man can menstruate and have babies, and if he feels like a woman, he is actually a woman and must be treated as such in law and in fact, while all the little boys mistakenly "assigned at birth" into little-girl bodies can be fixed with hormones and surgical castration.  Denying the empirical evidence of over 700 injured or killed police officers and a billion dollars in property damage — just so they can deny the existence of BLM riots — may be something, but it ain't science.

That's because Democrat science isn't real science, because it's really religion.  As for what Pelosi's religion really is, science hasn't been able to solve that.

T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan.  You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.