VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Catholic Herald [London, England]
December 20, 2023
By Thomas Colsy
The Vatican’s latest declaration bombshell, authored by one of the most senior clerics in the Roman Curia, has duped the international press and its readers alike into believing that the Catholic Church has softened its position on homosexuality. It hasn’t.
In describing how sinners, who may be in a same-same relationship, may ask for a “spontaneous blessing” from a priest – a type of blessing that has never been denied to any, nor been given on a discriminatory basis – Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez in “Fiducia Supplicans: On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings” has introduced nothing new.
Same-sex couples, as individual souls, may receive a blessing from a cleric. Their relationship may not. An important distinction.
To clarify the mess and misunderstanding, it must be explained what the endorsed blessings are and aren’t.
Firstly, those “spontaneous” blessings which have been authorised. This summer, when I was among some 1.6 million of my fellow Catholics on the bustling streets of Lisbon during World Youth Day, a friend and I asked for this type of blessing frequently.
Spotting a priest in a cassock, we would approach, request a blessing, which was obliged, fall down on our knees, bow our heads, and receive the mysterious spiritual benefits that a priest is ontologically capable of conferring. He would make a sign of the cross in the air, on our foreheads, or lay his hands on our scalp. It would be over in a matter of seconds.
The priest in every instance knew nothing about me. He did not ask if I was in an unrepentant state or habit of mortal sin – or if I was active in a romantic same-sex relationship. It didn’t – and doesn’t – matter. He just distributed the blessing. As is custom.
Catholics will likely see this take place in the communion line at Mass. Those whose conscience convicts them of mortal sin, and prevents them from sacrilegiously communing, will ask for such a blessing instead until they find absolution and once again return to a state of grace.
There are of course other reasons one may ask for a blessing. Catechumens typically request blessings until they enter the Church and are permitted to commune. However, once again, the priest neither asks what one’s reasons may be to desire this blessing, nor discriminates.
This is the “spontaneous blessing” in question. They are good things. It is entirely desirable that they not be denied to practising homosexuals, and it might be hoped that this may help guide them to a depth of faith at which they may be willing to stop sinning. This is what Fernandez and the Church have encouraged. But this must not be confused with formal, ceremonial blessings of another sort.
Fortunately, now that the news cycle has settled a bit, headlines such as the Washington Post’s initial egregiously misleading “Vatican says yes to blessings of same-sex unions” are less common.
The Post’s headline is categorically not the case. In fact, Fiducia Supplicans is quite insistent that clerics may not under any circumstance allow their actions to convey the impression that the Church approves homosexual activity. It insists:
“…precisely to avoid any form of confusion or scandal, when the prayer of blessing is requested by a couple in an irregular situation, even though it is expressed outside the rites prescribed by the liturgical books, this blessing should never be imparted in concurrence with the ceremonies of a civil union, and not even in connection with them [author’s emphasis]. Nor can it be performed with any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding. The same applies when the blessing is requested by a same-sex couple.”
That’s a big No to anything resembling special ceremonies. No bridal or groom outfits. No family and friends invited. No rainbow apparel. Blessings of other sorts that resemble a mock-wedding, and which you can find in certain Protestant denominations, are not permitted. The Church, as it affirmed in a 2021 document, is powerless and unable to bless sin. Much less to encourage it.
The letter further insists, in no unclear terms, that any blessing must be given “without officially validating their status or changing in any way [author’s emphasis] the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage”.
There’s a great irony in the fact that a letter which not only reminds clerics that they may not do anything to give the impression of approval to same-sex relationships, but even suggests those in them are “destitute” and “in need of… help” should have been misreported as the Church approving same-sex relationships.
Clearly, the Church is not recognising, much less “saying yes” to or encouraging, same-sex unions. The couple, as a pair of individual souls in need of divine grace in order to live a righteous life, may be blessed (as any other sinner may). The union may not.
It is even likely that the purpose of this declaration was a rebuke to Belgian bishops who in 2022 released a document suggesting, in open rebellion after an earlier 2021 Vatican statement to the contrary, that the Church could ask God to “bless and perpetuate” the same-sex relationship.
So, the suggestion by Vatican News (formally affiliated with the Holy See) that the latest declaration by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez “opens [the] possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations” is not entirely accurate, and certainly hasn’t helped things. As explained, nothing has been “opened”.
Despite what some think has happened, and as much as they cheer or mourn as they insist it has, nothing has been innovated. Nothing fundamentally has changed.
There is more to this story though. That the Church has been lurched into another PR disaster in misreportage and the misleading of presumably millions of people is no mystery.
What has happened then? Noise, as usual. Plenty of it. And confusion – a particularly generous helping of that too. Par for the course during this pontificate. It could have been avoided.
It must first be explained that Pope Francis is not one for clarity. Fernandez appears to be similar. The Church, however, is an institution which operates according to strictly delineated definitions and categories.
One of the most serious problems with Pope Francis’s papal leadership is that he seems to flout these strict parameters and reinvent terms without providing definitions. A prime example of this kind of causing a mess occurred when he lambasted “proselytism” (which is, to him, bad) as opposed to “evangelisation” (which is, to him, good). Headlines followed that the pope condemns those who try to “proselytise” their faith, which at a verbatim level was all but entirely accurate.
Scandalous papal behaviour, surely…except, it wasn’t. The minor detail on the other side of the story is that in the same breath the Pope praised those who “evangelise”.
It was irritatingly misleading, but not a departure from Catholic teaching. The frenzy of the past 24 hours is the same thing.
This Pope doesn’t help himself sometimes, and his pontificate has been full enough of lessons about the problems caused by such ambiguity that he ought to have learned by now. It’s not unreasonable to ask whether the ambiguity was intentional.
It may be speculated – supported by the seemingly deliberately ambiguous Vatican News headline – that those involved in the declaration were looking to placate liberal onlookers and gain the adulation of the LGBT+ supportive masses. Joseph Shaw, President of the Latin Mass Society and former academic at the University of Oxford, put it thus:
“The best way to understand it is to see it as part of a strategy to make the greatest possible liberal-friendly publicity splash with the smallest-possible disciplinary or doctrinal concession. Again and again Pope Francis has been given credit by liberals inside and outside the Church for making great changes when, on closer examination, nothing of substance has changed. In this case, priests are not authorised to do anything they were not already allowed to do.”
This is an entirely reasonable and accurate reading of the document and subsequent drama.
With Fr James Martin SJ, a prominent LGBT+ advocate in the Church, quick to publicise his blessing of a gay couple, it is hard not to lay blame at the feet of Fernandez and Fiducia Supplicans. The Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) announced in a public statement that the harm caused by the declaration stems not from what the document itself innovates, but the “scandal lies in the fact that…the result produced on the faithful…is one of affirmation”.
I know plenty of traditionalists who fear it’s in fact far more serious than SSPX’s reading, given this is a magisterial document. However, Catholics must remember that it is the letter of the law which counts in the magisterium of the Church – and not the whims, desires or intentions of senior prelates or even the Pope. Tradition, universally adhered to, echoes down the generations; not incidental abuses.
The Pope and Cardinal Fernandez appear to see themselves as progressives. In their eagerness to reassure the masses how warm and friendly they are towards LGBT+ individuals, they convinced everyone they had softened the Catholic stance on sexual ethics by releasing a document which actually doubles down on those same teachings.
Photo: Swiss guards in front of St Peter’s Basilica before the canonisation mass of Blessed Louis and Zelie Martin, the parents of St. Thérèse of Lisieux; Vatican, Italy, 18 October 2015. (Photo credit: FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP via Getty Images.)Tags Cardinal Victor Fernandez Fiducia supplicans Pope Francis Vatican