A new Vatican document offers the possibility of blessings for same-sex couples, provided they do not seek to imitate a marriage.
The document, called Fiducia supplicans, was published by the Vatican’s doctrine office, Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), on Monday after being approved by the Pope. While officially the document has not changed the Church’s traditional moral teaching, the ambiguity of the Vatican’s messaging leaves open the possibility of liberal priests interpreting it however they want.
Until now, there has been no official document from the Vatican other than the response to the Dubia presented by a group of cardinals ahead of October’s synod, which addressed the issue of blessing homosexual unions. In terms of content, Fiducia supplicans does not add anything new to the response to the Dubia. However, its form gives it an authoritative character.
The document, published a few days before Christmas, states that it is possible to bless “couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples” but in a form that “should not be fixed ritually by ecclesial authorities to avoid producing confusion with the blessing proper to the Sacrament of Marriage.”
No standardisation of such blessings is therefore on the agenda, and the form they take is left to the discretion of the celebrant. These blessings should remain spontaneous, and can take place, for example, during a visit to a shrine, a meeting with a priest, a group prayer or a pilgrimage (§40). The insistence on the need to avoid ritualisation appears to be a response to an innovation by the Belgian episcopate, which a few months ago intended to propose a standard prayer for blessing same-sex couples.
The openness officially permitted in the declaration is accompanied by a reminder of the Church’s traditional doctrine on marriage, which, the document emphasises, remains unchanged: “Rites and prayers that could create confusion between what constitutes marriage 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.”
It is not certain that this reminder of the Church’s doctrine on marriage will be heeded by public opinion, which is on the lookout for the slightest sign of ‘modernisation.’ The possibility of blessing a same-sex couple must be accompanied by a whole series of safeguards (no parallel civil union, no use of the signs, gestures and vestments proper to marriage) which, in practice, will be difficult to respect. As Eric Sammons, Executive Director of Crisis magazine, points out, Catholic doctrine on marriage is in fact undermined by the document.
The doctrinal declaration Fiducia supplicans justifies the possibility of blessing same-sex couples by using a new definition of blessing. The Vatican website states:
The person asking for a blessing “shows that he or she needs God’s saving presence in his or her life,” because he or she is expressing “a request for help addressed to God, a prayer to be able to live better.” This request must be welcomed and valued “outside a liturgical framework,” when we find ourselves “in an area of greater spontaneity and freedom.”
The blessing is assimilated to an act of devotion, and it is therefore not necessary to demand “prior moral perfection” in order to confer it.
In the third part of the declaration, the meaning of the blessing is explored in greater depth. It is said to be a gesture towards “those who, recognising themselves to be destitute and in need of God’s help, do not claim legitimacy for their own status, but ask that all that is true, good and humanly valid in their lives and relationships be invested, healed and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit.” How many of those who will ask for such a blessing in the future “recognise that they are destitute”?
The formula itself is a source of ambiguity, for it highlights “what is true, good and humanly valid” in the lives of people who have made objectively morally disordered choices, without making any mention whatsoever of the need for them to escape from a state of sin. A blessing given in this way gives the impression that the couple requesting it are seeking some form of approval, since it is hard to imagine two men or two women coming together to ask for a blessing to help them stop living in this way.
The search for a way out of sin should remain the priority of the priest dispensing the blessing, but there is nothing in the text to urge him to do so. Traditionally, and this is what the Vatican was still defending in 2021, it is not possible to bless sin, i.e., a disordered ‘couple’ situation, while it is always possible to bless a person individually so that God can help him or her. Nothing is certain anymore.
The many subtleties regarding the circumstances and form of the blessing mean that there is a high risk of confusion in the eyes of the public. In practice, how will priests in parishes respond to requests from same-sex couples? There is a risk of an explosion of sham marriages, justified by the best intentions in the world.
Some have already announced their intention to go beyond the pontifical recommendations, such as Father James Martin, a well-known advocate of the LGBT cause in the Church: “Along with many Catholic priests, I will now be delighted to bless my friends in same-sex marriages,” he told CNN.
However, some LGBT activists feel that the ‘step forward’ is still insufficient. Ramón Gómez, in charge of human rights for the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation group in Chile, deplores the fact that Fiducia Supplicans maintains a clear inferiority between same-sex and heterosexual couples.
Beyond the fundamental question of blessing same-sex couples, there is also the question of the methods used by the Holy Father. For many months, the argument of synodality and collegial decision-making had become, in the mouth of the pontiff, the cornerstone of ecclesial governance. On the question of the blessing of homosexual unions, the Synod on Synodality, which met in October, came out against such blessings. But the Pope, through the voice of Cardinal Fernandez, Prefect of the DDF, has decided to overrule the Synod and take the decision alone. This is neither the first nor certainly the last contradiction of this pontificate.
