I think about my parents all the time, especially on Sunday when I’m at Mass. My mother always said, ’We do not pray to win elections. We pray for people’s health, we pray that God’s will be done, we pray that we do our best. But we do not pray to win elections.’

Pelosi frames political life within a Catholic moral horizon shaped by family formation. The quote contrasts instrumental religion—treating prayer as a tool for personal or partisan gain—with a more traditional understanding of prayer as oriented toward God’s will, the well-being of others, and the ethical duty to “do our best.” By attributing the principle to her mother, Pelosi also signals a lineage of values: humility about outcomes, restraint against triumphalism, and an insistence that faith should discipline ambition rather than sanctify it. The remark implicitly critiques the conflation of piety with political victory and presents public service as accountable to standards beyond electoral success.