CNSNews.com is a bit obsessed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. When it’s not trying to portray her as frail and senile, it loves to detail her calls to prayer.
In 2018, CNS published a mocking column from John Horvat II sneering at her call to pray for Dreamers, huffing that Pelosi “calls herself Catholic” and accusing her of having “politicized” her call to prayer. Last October, Susan Jones mocked her again under the headline “Pelosi, After Provoking Trump, Urges Prayers for His ‘Health’,” blaming her and Democrats for “deliberately provok[ing]” Trump (and , of course, not Trump for being so lacking in self-control that he allowed himself to be provoked).
After touting in February how Trump lashed out at Pelosi for allegedly “say[ing] I pray for you when they know that that’s not so,” CNS has spent the following several months being fascinated by Pelosi’s various calls to prayer:
- Pelosi: ‘Why Don’t We Begin With a Prayer’
- Pelosi: ‘I Am Always Advocating Prayer. I Am a Big Believer in Prayer’
- Nancy Pelosi Tells Stephen Colbert: ‘I Am Always a Believer in Prayer, as I Know You Are as Well’
- Pelosi Urges Colleagues: ‘During This Holy Season for People of Many Faiths, Let Us Pray…’
- Pelosi Calls for ‘World Prayer…That God Would Enlighten Those Responsible for the Common Good’
- Nancy Pelosi Retweets: ‘May We Use This Moment of Isolation to Pray as One Body’
- Nancy Pelosi: ‘I Always Pray for the President’
- Pelosi Spends Moment in Head-Bowed Silence as She Begins Press Briefing
- Pelosi: ‘We Don’t Have a Vaccine and…Pray That Science Will Be an Answer to Our Prayers in That Regard’
- Pelosi: ‘Let’s Pray for Those Who Are Hungry; Let’s Pray Harder for Those Who Will Not Feed Them’
- Nancy Pelosi Sends a Prayer to Her Democratic Colleagues: ‘Pray Harder for the Wealthy…’
- Nancy Pelosi on President Trump: ‘I Pray for Him Every Day’
- Pelosi: ‘I Pray…the President’s Heart Will Be Open to the Millions of People Who Have Been Affected’
- Pelosi on Trump: ‘My Heart is Full of Prayers for Him’
It’s unclear what CNS wants its readers to take away from its fixation on Pelosi and prayer. Its uber-Catholic editors like Terry Jeffrey and Michael W. Chapman have never respected the way Pelosi conducts her Catholic faith — it conducted a failed hit job on her over how she had “an epiphany on Easter” — so they obviously don’t believe her calls to prayer are sincere. So why promote them at all, except as a sort of backhanded acknowledgment that even the hated Pelosi believes in prayer?
That would certainly conflict with the prevailing frail-and-senile narrative at CNS, though. So it’s a mystery.