On Monday morning, 18th December 2023, the Vatican released a bombshell declaration: Priests are officially allowed to bless same-sex couples.
According to the New York Times, the formal statement, Fiducia Supplicans, was Pope Francis’s “most definitive step yet to make the Roman Catholic Church more welcoming to LGBTQ Catholics and more reflective of his vision of a more pastoral, and less rigid, church.”
As Haley Strack reported for National Review, leading figures on the Catholic left have jumped at the opportunity to turn ambiguous language in Fiducia Supplicans into a clarion call for supporting same-sex marriage:
Jesuit priest and editor of the magazine America, James J. Martin, celebrated the document as a “huge step forward” for LGBTQ Catholics.
The Church “recognizes the deep desire in many Catholic same-sex couples for God’s presence and help in their committed relationships,” he told the Associated Press. “Along with many Catholic priests, I will now be delighted to bless my friends in same-sex marriages.”
The key point that Martin glosses over — an omission also made by many mainstream news outlets — is that there is no such thing as same-sex marriage in the Catholic Church, nor can there ever be. Monday’s declaration repeatedly affirms this point.
Despite the proclamations of victory hailing from progressives across religious lines, the explosive document was ultimately a squib — the kind of pyrotechnic device used by Hollywood to achieve a particular incendiary effect but that inflicts no real damage.
Gay MarriageThe Vatican’s Deliberate Confusion on Same-Sex CouplesTwo Fathers Sue Because Surrogate Gave Birth to a Daughter
As I have written previously, when Pope Francis’s epistolary remarks on the topic were first publicized, the church has remained firm in its affirmation that marriage is a sacramental union between one man and one woman. The public-relations spin on the topic, however, has followed the clashing tunes of different papacies.
The primary author of Fiducia Supplicans is not Francis but Cardinal Fernandez, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, an administrative body founded centuries ago to defend the church from heresy. (The DDF used to be called the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition — yes, that Inquisition.) Fernandez, an Argentine Archbishop emeritus and prominent liberal theologian, made sure to present the declaration in the language of Progress:
The value of this document, however, is that it offers a specific and innovative contribution to the pastoral meaning of blessings, permitting a broadening and enrichment of the classical understanding of blessings, which is closely linked to a liturgical perspective.
Such theological reflection, based on the pastoral vision of Pope Francis, implies a real development from what has been said about blessings in the Magisterium and the official texts of the Church.
This opening salvo from Fernandez serves to misdirect the left-leaning reader — it dangles in front of his eyes the scrumptious idea that church teaching on homosexuality is open to innovation and “real development.”
A closer and further read, however, would disabuse him of such an impression. Fernandez goes on to clarify the particular kind of pastoral blessing that is acceptable in the case of a same-sex couple. The blessing must be non-liturgical and cannot be confused with a marriage rite:
Rites and prayers that could create confusion between what constitutes marriage — which is the “exclusive, stable, and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the generation of children” — and what contradicts it are inadmissible.
This conviction is grounded in the perennial Catholic doctrine of marriage; it is only in this context that sexual relations find their natural, proper, and fully human meaning. The Church’s doctrine on this point remains firm.
He further outlines the limitations imposed on the recipients of a special liturgical rite — in this case, the sacrament of marriage:
When a blessing is invoked on certain human relationships by a special liturgical rite, it is necessary that what is blessed corresponds with God’s designs written in creation and fully revealed by Christ the Lord.
For this reason, since the Church has always considered only those sexual relations that are lived out within marriage to be morally licit, the Church does not have the power to confer its liturgical blessing when that would somehow offer a form of moral legitimacy to a union that presumes to be a marriage or to an extra-marital sexual practice.
The church’s doctrinal position on marriage, “an indissoluble union between a man and a woman,” stems not from antiquated bigotry or malicious scheming, but rather from the very foundation of Catholic theology.
In the Catholic vision of reality, mankind’s reason for being, his telos, is unity with God. The sacred unity of marriage is divinely ordained as a theological foreshadowing of man’s destined unity with the Creator.
The very being of man and woman was created for this sacramental union. To reject the church’s stance on marriage is to reject the metaphysical system underlying and permeating Catholic theology.
Crucially, Fernandez makes clear that pastoral blessings on same-sex couples are not to be understood liturgically as a sacrament or priestly affirmation of the couple’s lifestyle. He offers a definition of pastoral blessings that presents the priest as the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son — overjoyed that his son, although led astray, wants to come home:
Pope Francis urges us to contemplate, with an attitude of faith and fatherly mercy, the fact that “when one asks for a blessing, one is expressing a petition for God’s assistance, a plea to live better, and confidence in a Father who can help us live better.”
This request should, in every way, be valued, accompanied, and received with gratitude.
People who come spontaneously to ask for a blessing show by this request their sincere openness to transcendence, the confidence of their hearts that they do not trust in their own strength alone, their need for God, and their desire to break out of the narrow confines of this world, enclosed in its limitations.
Realist critics of Fernandez have argued that a priestly blessing would not draw a same-sex couple closer to God, but would instead offer hollow affirmation of their way of life. Fernandez argues that it is not up to the priest to judge the sincerity of those seeking a blessing.
The Church, moreover, must shy away from resting its pastoral praxis on the fixed nature of certain doctrinal or disciplinary schemes, especially when they lead to “a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying.”
Thus, when people ask for a blessing, an exhaustive moral analysis should not be placed as a precondition for conferring it. For, those seeking a blessing should not be required to have prior moral perfection.
I do not envy the job of pastors who are confronted with “edge” cases on this matter — where a supplicant may walk through their door with no apparent intention to “live better,” in the words of Pope Francis.
However, the very act of anyone walking through a parish door, seeking encouragement and guidance from a priest, should be celebrated by Catholics everywhere. If more people are willing to enter a church and talk to a priest as a result of Fiducia Supplicans, that would be its own kind of victory.
However, this contingency remains tenuous.
It is the core work of the church to bless every human person and steer them in paths of righteousness.
Fiducia Supplicans righteously seeks to uphold both of these truths, but sometimes emphasizes the former while obscuring the latter.
The faithful — lay and ordained alike — must take on the challenge of holding these two truths together.