Nancy Pelosi announces she will retire from Congress in 2027

CNA Staff, Nov 6, 2025 / 12:15 pm (CNA).

Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader who has served in Congress since the late 1980s, announced on Nov. 6 that she will not seek reelection once her current term expires, ending a 50-year-long career in politics including roughly four decades in the nation’s capitol.

In a video address to residents of the city of San Francisco, which she represents in Congress, Pelosi said she has “truly loved serving” the constituents of the California city.

“That is why I want you, my fellow San Franciscans, to be the first to know, I will not be seeking reelection to Congress,” she said. 

“With a grateful heart, I look forward to my final year of service as your proud representative,” she said in the address. 

Pelosi first assumed congressional office in 1987. She notably served as the first female Speaker of the House from 2007–2011.

She began her career in Democratic politics in 1976 when she was elected as a member of the Democratic National Committee. She headed the California Democratic Party from 1981–1983. 

Catholic identity

Pelosi has described herself as “very Catholic,” styling herself in 2022 as “devout, practicing, all of that,” though her professed Catholicism has long been at odds with her staunch, decadeslong support of abortion. 

In 2022 Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone announced that Pelosi should not be admitted to holy Communion in the Archdiocese of San Francisco and should not present herself to receive the Eucharist until she publicly repudiates her support for abortion, which the Catholic Church teaches is a grave sin. 

A longtime backer of LGBT politics, Pelosi has also criticized the U.S. bishops for what she has claimed is “very negative, anti-LGBTQ stuff,” including regarding surgical or chemical techniques that aim to exchange or simulate the sex characteristics of a patient’s body for those of the opposite sex.

“[S]ome of it is stirred up by some of the more conservative leaders in the Church,” she alleged in 2023.

Pelosi has been married to her husband, Paul, since 1963. They have five children.

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