Yes, the Ivory Coast response was very helpful. It emphatically forbad any blessing of blatently illegal/immoral unions, where incest or paedophilia was involved. But how do you define "incest"? And how do you deal with polygamy under FS? Are you allowed to "bless" a large, er, extended household with one bloke and five ladies? The string of culturally complex questions already appearing makes it clear what a shoddy and worthless document FS is. And the inglorious conflicting mess of answers coming from just a small sample of countries and interested parties makes it clear what an incoherent shambles Catholic teaching is at the pastoral level. Malawi and Kazakhstan flatly forbad their priests to give any such blessings......but do bishops actually have the authority to thus forbid their priests?
Thanks so much, Luke, for assembling this list and the separate post with links to 35 articles on FS.
My impression is that most of this small sample could only mumble evasively. You might be able to read between the lines if you knew the people concerned. From my home turf (England) the quote is not from any of my bishops but a LGBT group. I guess that 2 out of 19 Catholic bishops would be mumbling against and the rest sort of mumbling in favour. Malawi and Kazakhstan were plainly against, but Kazakhstan has one of the smallest Catholic communities on earth.
I checked out the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales' website late on Tues 19th and could not see any mention of FS anywhere. Maybe they are still consulting their theological advisors......
I imagine that most of the bishops who are against this document are not going to speak out against it. The responses from Kazakhstan and Malawi are going to be rare, when all is said and done I think. Some conservative bishops will say nothing. Some will speak out and "welcome" it for the brownie points in Rome while saying little of substance, or reinforce the "nothing has changed" part (despite how nebulous that is). The liberal bishops will openly act with glee.
The actual interesting part, as JD and Ed have covered in the articles on this subject already, will be if Rome actually cracks down on the Belgians and Germans and their "official" blessings that they're pushing for. And also, to see if any liberal/moderate bishops start punishing priests who turn down the opportunity to give these blessings. I would expect the rift between bishops and their priests to widen in the coming years even more than would have been expected before this was published.
Fiducia Supplicans will likely go down as the most important document of the Francis pontificate--for holding the line against progressivism in the Church. This won't reach Humanae Vitae levels of importance, but the question of ecclesiastical endorsement of irregular and same sex unions has been thoroughly quashed, whether the activists within and without on both sides realize it yet or not. The Holy Spirit pulls the rabbit from the hat yet again.
Stenny: So, if I read you correctly, you are saying that this is actually a document which seeks to quell the liberal, progressive tide such as the German bishops? Now that's an interesting thought!
Yeah, I suspect a purpose of FS is to discourage certain bishops and their conferences from formalizing same sex blessings. I doubt this will work though.
It's not an interesting thought; it's what the document explicitly says. Paragraph 3 in full: "The above-mentioned Responsum elicited numerous and varied reactions: some welcomed the clarity of the document and its consistency with the Church’s perennial teaching; others did not share the negative response it gave to the question or did not consider the formulation of its answer and the reasons provided in the attached Explanatory Note to be sufficiently clear. To meet the latter reaction with fraternal charity, it seems opportune to take up the theme again and offer a vision that draws together the doctrinal aspects with the pastoral ones in a coherent manner because “all religious teaching ultimately has to be reflected in the teacher’s way of life, which awakens the assent of the heart by its nearness, love, and witness.”
In other words, some people--particularly the German bishops--dissented from the 2021 Responsa, which famously stated "God cannot bless sin", and/or found the reasoning of the Responsa inadequate. Fiducia Supplicans therefore elaborates on that Responsa in greater detail.
Notice what immediately follows. Paragraph 4 declares the Catholic teaching on marriage and sexual morality is unchanging, and further declares that any rite or prayer that contradicts or confusing this teaching is not allowed. Paragraph 5 then reaffirms that because this is the Gospel understanding of marriage and sexual morality, the Church has no power to bless same-sex or irregular unions.
That's the door slammed shut on the German bishops.
The rest of the document is spent trying to understand the upper limit of the blessings that such people can receive and under what conditions. And the answer is clear: such people must not be seeking approval of their relationship but asking God for assistance to live according to the Gospel (FS 32). This is the same kind of blessing that can be given to any sinner (FS 32), which never implies approval of their sin (FS 40). The document even includes numerous explicit prohibitions on the form, content, circumstances, and appearances of such a blessing that would generate confusion. In other words, the rest of the document is about drawing as hard of a line as possible to constrain the German bishops to the level of "blessing the sinner, not the sin".
Apparently in many places, people are deeply scandalized by the notion that such sinners could blessed together as sinners (as opposed to separately as sinners), so they have completely missed the actual intent and import of the document.
To even begin to compare this to Humanae Vitae in terms of its "holding the line" against the odds, is laughable.
Back in the Pauline Pontifcate, literally everyone - literally everyone inside the Church and outside the Church - was fully expecting a complete moral endorsement of contraception right to the very moment his (already anticipated) encyclical was released. Paul VI might have been the only person on the planet committed to remaining faithful to the Church's teaching on the dignity of Human Life. He was the Lot, the last righteous man remaining in the city, so to speak. People openly rebelled - clerics of all ranks, politicians, Catholic professionals in the sciences and medicine.
In the Church nowadays, there are many bastions still defending the orthodox and clear Catholic position on marriage, homosexual acts, irregular situations, scandal, blessings, and whatnot. Francis is not a friend to such persons. This document is so heavily laden with hyper-nuance and caveats and qualifiers that it leaves a remarkable amount of wiggle room for it to spun and abused to do the opposite of what it says in (supposedly) plain text. The fact that the Belgians and the Germans are feeling bolstered by Fiducia Supplicans completely refutes your idea that this is a landmark document defending orthodoxy and ensuring continuity of teaching.
I think his point is that now twice under the Francis pontificate there is written doctrine confirming the Church’s orthodox position on marriage and against homosexual and irregular unions and that the Holy Spirit will use that for the good of the Church. It’s a beautiful, hopeful perspective and I’m grateful to him for sharing it.
It had also occurred to me that the Holy Spirit will also use the provision that puts so much on individual pastors—which seems and is a terrible thing to do—to sift sheep from goats.
My husband and I were talking about concern over the next pope and where the ship turns from here—because it feels like straight off the edge of the world. But then I remembered while the College might presently be being remade one by one in a direction I don’t prefer, the presbyterate is full of young, holy priests, and the future College will be called from among them.
I don’t know. It all feels like such a mess today and gives every appearance of being one. Satan wants us to wallow in that feeling and cast off the joy we just committed to on Sunday and to allow that anger and despair to color our actions. And yet, the living God of the universe makes beautiful things out of dust and has promised us that the gates of hell shall not prevail against us and has given us a documented history of many, many times the church should have died and did not. This document and this pontificate are not the end of the story, whether the near effect is renewal or schism. We are still the Church. God is still God.
Are you saying that [with the publication of Fiducia Supplicans] “Satan wants us to wallow in that feeling and cast off the joy we just committed to on Sunday and to allow that anger and despair to color our actions”?
If so, wouldn’t that make Fernandez and Bergoglio agents of Satan?
No, I am not saying that and would not say that. What I am saying is that I, and I assume others but am perhaps out of line in assuming so, felt shock and even temptation to despair at the issuance of FS because it gives the appearance of being a vehicle that binds the Church to the practical living of heresy in spirit even though it avoids it in letter. And that perception of Monday’s events is a large temptation to despair for me and perhaps others.
I can be tempted to despair over this or over not making a red light. In both situations, the actor is me, not the external. It is I who choose to accept or to reject the provocations of the enemy, and the other’s goodness or absence of goodness or even inability to be anything at all as in the case of a traffic light is not the deciding factor.
To build the argument that I would be tempted to despair specifically because the pope and a cardinal are “agents of Satan” would be to make the massively prideful and lethal assumption that I myself am so good that I can only be corrupted by something that is wholly bad, and that is simply not the case. Though the grace of Christ is in me, I am not yet a saint and my will is still perfectly capable of making a mess of anything that comes before me. God could send me a blessing and I could curse it. That certainly wouldn’t make God the bad actor. It’s still me.
To clarify, yes I am saying that I think Satan wants us to wallow in despair. No, I am not saying I think the pope and cardinal are agents of Satan or that any choice of mine to wallow in despair necessitates that they be so. If any of my responses have been flawed or misleading as to my intended point, I apologize. If you can refine my logic, I welcome your feedback.
The first pope was called Satan by Our Lord once (though this was before he received the Holy Spirit and apostolic authority), and opposed to his face by another bishop at least once. If that happened to the first pope why can it not happen to his successors who presumably have less grace than an apostle?
I humbly submit that there is a lack of clear exhortation to reform and repent in Fiducia Supplicans and this will need to be clarified in the near future by the magisterium. The very title, "On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings" indicates that this is written to pastors, and not the lay faithful. The opening words are beautiful, "The supplicating trust of the faithful People of God" and imply that we are but poor beggars and in need of reform. And, I think any priest or bishop instinctively wants to reach out to all people, such as those who have same-sex attraction. But, can this happen without some reform? Pastorally guiding the morally weak in God's infinite love is indeed a good and noble thing, but it must include a call to moral perfectability and a universal call to holiness. This is the central weakness of a declaration which instructs pastors to freely offer blessings to any and all who may seek a blessing regardless of intent to reform, and appears to assign "narcissistic and authoritarian elitism" (25) to a cleric who might choose to refrain from offering one for a very good, longer range, pastoral reason. (For example, I might choose not to bless the rings of a civilly-only married couple in the hopes that the couple will soon seek to confect the Sacrament of Matrimony.) FS could create a dangerous “hall pass” for many people who really might need and want to make some serious changes in lifestyle. Think about a dual drug and porn addict. We don’t bless a young guy and say to him: “May God bless you in your porn and meth addiction! Be at peace as you as you do meth and enjoy your porn...after all, who am I to judge?" No, we want this young man to be free of those addictions so that he can follow Christ and find joy in the good life. FS creates problematic pastoral situations for pastors whereby a homosexual couple – or anyone immersed in an irregular or sinful lifestyle - will now assume that the moral fight is over, and, well, "since I got a special blessing, there is no further need for my reform."
May God bless us all as we seek to understand and strive for holiness in these dark and confusing times.
You are right. There is an implied call to repentance within the document. But it is easy enough to ignore and a lot of the usual suspects are doing just that.
So then how does a priest offer a conforming blessing? I'd like to poll the audience on which of the following prayers are permissible under Fiducia Supplicans:
Option 1: Father, we acknowledge our need for your love and mercy. I ask your blessing on your children, Adam and Steve, to give them the grace to strive for holiness and reject all that is contrary to the Gospel. Bless them with chastity and fortitude.
Option 2: Father, I thank you for the gift of Adam and Steve and their witness of love. May their commitment to each other in good times and bad, for better or for worse, remind them of your fidelity to your children. As they care for each other, may your blessing be upon them.
It's truly heartbreaking to watch the Catholic Church embrace the errors of liberal protestantism with respect to homosexuality. No protestant sect that has gone down this road is thriving. It's institutional suicide. Despite all the hair-splitting and legalese in Fiducia Supplicans, and the sincere but-wrongheaded insistence that nothing in Church teaching about marriage and sexuality have changed, the newspaper headlines and radio reports have got it right. Forget de jure. The de facto result here is that the leaders of Catholic Church in the Vatican have raised the white flag and surrendered to the LGBT agenda. Period. This isn't the end point. This is just the beginning. We are now approximately where the Episcopalians and liberal national churches of Scandinavia were 30 years ago. Unless a miracle occurs, and the Vatican changes course, there's a fairly good chance that, say, 30 years from now, your local diocesan bishop, will be married to a male partner. That's the trajectory on which the Church officially embarked yesterday.
The Lutheran "Bishop" of Stockholm was a lady "married" to another lady. I recall my visit to the stunning Gustav Vasa church in central Stockholm in 2013 for the main Sunday morning liturgy. Maybe 15 people present in this cathedral scale church.
I concur wholeheartedly! Like the Vatican's pusillanimous concordat with the Chinese Communist Party, nothing good will come of this concordat with the Lavender Mafia. The usual suspects are calling it a "good first step" and clamoring for more explicit terms of surrender. The liberal protestant communities are proof that "progressivism" will hollow out your religion and wear its skin like a trophy!
This is like watching the Catholic Church's own version of the LDS Official Declaration 2 from 1978.
The Church is frantically trying to convince us "no, this isn't what it looks like, this is completely fine!" and everybody else looking at it thinks "yeah right, this is obviously you changing your stance."
People back then didn't buy it about "the LDS and the Blacks," and they're not buying it now about "the Catholics and the gays."
The irreverant comedy musical "Book of Mormon" has a tongue-in-cheek line: "And in 1978 God changed his mind about Black People!" now people are looking at us and chiming in "And in 2023 God changed his mind about gay people!"
We already have the wickedly funny Lutheran Satires channel on Youtube. I recommend the video where Luther and Zwingli have a ferocious debate on the Real Presence in rap form. Frank the Hippie Pope appears in older videos, which lampoon Pope Francis' worst early howlers (like Who am I to judge). The LS creators have ample raw material to let Pope Francis explain how FS changes nothing, but really changes everything.
Thanks to Providence, which has countered much of this pontificate with the symbolic weight of Pope Benedict. I believe that blessings can be conferred in practice to people in mortal sin (e.g., at the end of Mass, it is given to all), so the declaration doesn't teach anything heterodox. However, from a pastoral perspective, I cannot see how it's anything but a catastrophe. I am genuinely concerned about divorced Catholics or Catholics with same-sex attraction or who lead a chaste life. How is this Fiducia Suppliant not a slap in their faces?
The blessing at Mass is not a good analogy, since the two are quite unlike each other. Of course in the context of liturgy there is a blessing on the faithful who have gathered to celebrate that liturgy. This does not mean that everyone who attends Mass has to pass some kind of moral purity test. Far from it. But suppose they weren’t there to celebrate a liturgy but rather to do something sinful. Let’s say it’s an abortionists’ conference to take a serious but pretty obvious example, or a gathering of people plotting to embezzle money or the like, to take a milder case. Is it not the case that this document would permit a non-liturgical blessing in these cases? After all, I’m sure there are glimmers of goodness and truth even among people who would attend such a gathering. If the abortionists asked for a blessing for their assembly from a priest, could he refuse?
The consensus position among some of the comments here seems to be that the document is orthodox. This does not seem clear to me at all. It’s one thing to bless individual sinners. It seems quite another thing to bless gatherings of people whose very purpose in the gathering is the commission of serious sin. The fact that there are hard cases among, say, the divorced and remarried with children does not change this basic dynamic.
I will divide my answers into two parts: first on the blessings and second on the "union."
Blessings, properly speaking, belong to what is known as 'quasi sacraments' (the document vaguely mentions this). Quasi sacraments can be conferred on people in mortal sin, including manifested sinners. A notable example is the Christian Funeral, also a quasi sacrament, which is not denied to manifested sinners who did not die reconciled to the Church. Historically, there was a prohibition on Christian Funerals for manifested usurers, murderers, concubines, and those who committed suicide. However, the prohibition was justified by the aim of avoiding scandal. When the prohibition was loosened, it was specified that it should not cause scandal, and to this day, a priest has the right to refuse a Christian Funeral for manifested sinners if he believes it may scandalize the faithful (1983 Canon Law no. 1184; 1917 Canon Law no. 1240; DDF Decree dated Sept. 20, 1973).
Whether through a universal prohibition or a priest exercising pastoral discretion, both cases fall under canon law rather than magisterial authority. The magisterial aspect lies in the recognition that quasi sacraments can be conferred on manifested sinners, including, in some cases, non-Christians, with the caveat of avoiding scandal. Canon Law plays a role in either introducing a universal prohibition or easing it.
Second, on unions: to have an object blessed, the object must first exist. Unions, whether between a man and his mistress or two homosexuals, do not, ontologically speaking, exist to be blessed.
In proper Catholic understanding, the DDF distinguished between de facto and de jure language. The language used is on a de facto basis (similar to when the Church refers to "Protestant" churches—they only exist de facto, but ontologically, before God, only the One Catholic Church exists hence they are our catholic brothers, albite astray. See Bl. Pope Pius IX letters to EO and protestants in 1869).
Since the union does not exist beyond the de facto level, the blessing is automatically for the individuals who are in mortal sin and cannot be anything beyond. Blessings are granted to all, even to the non-baptized if they asked for it in goodwill (See note above).
Would your average Catholic dude understand this sophisticated theology? No. Did the DDF err in using "street language" without introducing any qualifications? Yes.
On the contrary, a group of abortionists does ontologically exist, so a distinction between what is de facto and what is de jure cannot be established. For the psalmist says, "a gang of evildoers has closed in on me" (22:16), and Revelation refers to a "Synagouge of Satan" (2:9) so Scripture teaches us that an organization of evil may ontologically exist and, therefore, cannot be blessed, even if its members are not equal in culpability or have some individual merits.
Thank you for this thorough reply. I wonder what the reaction would have been if the declaration included the statement that “same-sex unions do not exist and cannot (properly speaking) be blessed.” I think I follow your argument, but I am certain this subtle point will not be observed in practice. It would have been helpful, for instance, to say that properly speaking only the individuals are blessed since the union doesn’t exist, but the document speaks in plain terms of “same-sex couples,” granting them, as you say, a de facto existence. Are there previous magisterial documents that do so? The way you describe the existence of Protestant ecclesial communities (de facto but not de jure) also strikes me as being rather different from the way these things are usually described in recent Vatican documents. Does this clever distinction between “jus” and “factum” not lose some of its savor if it is never made? Why should the declaration go to such great pains to lay out the conditions for the blessings if the distinction you describe is truly in the background?
Your answer raises another difficulty with the declaration. As you say, a blessing is a quasi-sacrament. If we just translate that into plainer English, it is “like a” sacrament. This also strikes me as patently true just for the average non-sophisticated layman like myself. When I had a priest come bless my house after moving in, I did so because I wished the church’s sacramental economy to be visited there. But paragraph 36 cautions that the blessing should not become similar to a sacrament. This seems incoherent based on the plain meaning of “blessing.” Sam Howard recently pointed out on X that the instruction to the Book of Blessings describes all blessings as liturgical!
Thank you again for your interesting answer. Let’s see how this all develops.
Grazie a te, as we say in Italy, dude! Just to clarify, I am not defending this Fiducia. In my opinion, it scandalizes the faithful and creates unnecessary confusion. It is vague and incoherent, signifying to me a generational crisis within the Church.
Indeed, as you mentioned, it is sad that the declaration did not use proper Catholic language. I am inclined to say that this is to be politically correct and "pastorally" rather than "theologically" oriented as the declaration's subtitle suggests.
The distinction itself dates back to ancient philosophy like Aristotle's Metaphysics and later, St. Thomas. The example I provided is from Blessed Pope Pius IX, as cited above, and Pope Benedict explaining Vatican II's Nostra Aetate Declaration. This is what I can recall from my memory at the moment.
On quasi-sacraments, including what we call in the Latin West as "Sacramentals," they indeed invoke the name of our merciful God to be involved in our life events, homes, businesses, activities, etc., as you rightly did.
I would like to take this chance to wish you a very merry Christmas, bro!
How naive can you be? ANY action from the church must be clear and above reproach. An ambiguous declaration like this is the absolute worst news coming out of the Vatican. Sin is sin. The Catechism is the Catechism. The Bible is the Bible. God is God.
No one will change their own behavior as a result of FS. The only result is that people doing the wrong thing will be emboldened and encourages in their self- and other-destruction.
This is the most telling quote, from the Vatican itself:
“The origin of the declaration is evangelical,” wrote the Dicastery for Communication’s editorial director. “On almost every page of the Gospel, Jesus breaks traditions and religious prescriptions, respectability, and social conventions. He performs actions that scandalize the self-righteous, the so-called ‘pure,’ those who shield themselves with norms and rules to distance, reject, and close doors.”
They are telling us what they think of the document. It is MEANT to scandalize the self-righteous (by which I guess he means those of us in heteronormative relationships who try to avoid mortal sin). There is a derisive tone when he says "so called 'pure.'" Like people can only be so-called pure. It feels like a slap in the face to those of us who are attempting - using the norms and rules of our Church and Creed - to HOLD FAST to that which was taught us, by pure and holy saints and martyrs. Should I not distance myself and my children from SIN? Should I not REJECT the perverse nature of the world and CLOSE THE DOOR to that? How is this a call to HOLINESS?
I keep telling myself the quote from Padre Pio - "Pray, hope and don't worry" but I DO feel the foundations of the One, True, Catholic and Apostolic church shifting beneath my feet. Part of the reason I became Catholic 23 years ago was because I saw in Her a bastion against the capitulation of the rest of the Christian world to relativism. And now....
Did Jesus "break traditions and religious prescriptions"? I thought he followed the law. He was in the upper room with his disciples fulfilling the Law, not breaking it. He frequently sent those he healed to the temple to complete the religious prescriptions. Have these people read the gospels at all? Each step of his life followed the law set in place. He, Christ, is its fulfillment.
Please don't put "make-up on this pig." This is awful.
If one wants the "proper interpretation" of FS, it's the picture in the New York Times the very next day of Fr JM SJ blessing a couple who are long-time friends of his. Every step is calculated.
Can anyone doubt that Fr JM SJ was kept in the loop every step of the way by his confrere in Rome and that he lined up his friends in advance for the photo op with the NYT?
The two bishops from Spain quoted above probably gave the best response.
The question on the polygamous households is an interesting one. I
Yes, the Ivory Coast response was very helpful. It emphatically forbad any blessing of blatently illegal/immoral unions, where incest or paedophilia was involved. But how do you define "incest"? And how do you deal with polygamy under FS? Are you allowed to "bless" a large, er, extended household with one bloke and five ladies? The string of culturally complex questions already appearing makes it clear what a shoddy and worthless document FS is. And the inglorious conflicting mess of answers coming from just a small sample of countries and interested parties makes it clear what an incoherent shambles Catholic teaching is at the pastoral level. Malawi and Kazakhstan flatly forbad their priests to give any such blessings......but do bishops actually have the authority to thus forbid their priests?
Thanks so much, Luke, for assembling this list and the separate post with links to 35 articles on FS.
Define 'blatently'
I would use one dictionary definition of "open and unashamed", in cases where the monstrous sin was plain to the priest.
Sorry, I was hinting at the modern world's problems with such definitions. People like you always pull me back to the earth I used to know.
Kazakhstan, and perhaps Spain, aside everyone is overjoyed, then?
My impression is that most of this small sample could only mumble evasively. You might be able to read between the lines if you knew the people concerned. From my home turf (England) the quote is not from any of my bishops but a LGBT group. I guess that 2 out of 19 Catholic bishops would be mumbling against and the rest sort of mumbling in favour. Malawi and Kazakhstan were plainly against, but Kazakhstan has one of the smallest Catholic communities on earth.
That is a good point. I found grating too that from the UK (where I live too) they could only quote an LGB group.
I checked out the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales' website late on Tues 19th and could not see any mention of FS anywhere. Maybe they are still consulting their theological advisors......
I now read an ex Anglican bishop has come out (so to speak...). He doesn't look too pleased.
He struck me as the most reasoning of the respondents.
I imagine that most of the bishops who are against this document are not going to speak out against it. The responses from Kazakhstan and Malawi are going to be rare, when all is said and done I think. Some conservative bishops will say nothing. Some will speak out and "welcome" it for the brownie points in Rome while saying little of substance, or reinforce the "nothing has changed" part (despite how nebulous that is). The liberal bishops will openly act with glee.
The actual interesting part, as JD and Ed have covered in the articles on this subject already, will be if Rome actually cracks down on the Belgians and Germans and their "official" blessings that they're pushing for. And also, to see if any liberal/moderate bishops start punishing priests who turn down the opportunity to give these blessings. I would expect the rift between bishops and their priests to widen in the coming years even more than would have been expected before this was published.
And Pope Francis accuses Cardinal Burke of creating disunity in the Church. Could the irony be any greater?
Fiducia Supplicans will likely go down as the most important document of the Francis pontificate--for holding the line against progressivism in the Church. This won't reach Humanae Vitae levels of importance, but the question of ecclesiastical endorsement of irregular and same sex unions has been thoroughly quashed, whether the activists within and without on both sides realize it yet or not. The Holy Spirit pulls the rabbit from the hat yet again.
Stenny: So, if I read you correctly, you are saying that this is actually a document which seeks to quell the liberal, progressive tide such as the German bishops? Now that's an interesting thought!
Yeah, I suspect a purpose of FS is to discourage certain bishops and their conferences from formalizing same sex blessings. I doubt this will work though.
If it was enforced it could work, but I don't expect this pontificate to punish anyone who goes further than what FS says is permissible.
It's not an interesting thought; it's what the document explicitly says. Paragraph 3 in full: "The above-mentioned Responsum elicited numerous and varied reactions: some welcomed the clarity of the document and its consistency with the Church’s perennial teaching; others did not share the negative response it gave to the question or did not consider the formulation of its answer and the reasons provided in the attached Explanatory Note to be sufficiently clear. To meet the latter reaction with fraternal charity, it seems opportune to take up the theme again and offer a vision that draws together the doctrinal aspects with the pastoral ones in a coherent manner because “all religious teaching ultimately has to be reflected in the teacher’s way of life, which awakens the assent of the heart by its nearness, love, and witness.”
In other words, some people--particularly the German bishops--dissented from the 2021 Responsa, which famously stated "God cannot bless sin", and/or found the reasoning of the Responsa inadequate. Fiducia Supplicans therefore elaborates on that Responsa in greater detail.
Notice what immediately follows. Paragraph 4 declares the Catholic teaching on marriage and sexual morality is unchanging, and further declares that any rite or prayer that contradicts or confusing this teaching is not allowed. Paragraph 5 then reaffirms that because this is the Gospel understanding of marriage and sexual morality, the Church has no power to bless same-sex or irregular unions.
That's the door slammed shut on the German bishops.
The rest of the document is spent trying to understand the upper limit of the blessings that such people can receive and under what conditions. And the answer is clear: such people must not be seeking approval of their relationship but asking God for assistance to live according to the Gospel (FS 32). This is the same kind of blessing that can be given to any sinner (FS 32), which never implies approval of their sin (FS 40). The document even includes numerous explicit prohibitions on the form, content, circumstances, and appearances of such a blessing that would generate confusion. In other words, the rest of the document is about drawing as hard of a line as possible to constrain the German bishops to the level of "blessing the sinner, not the sin".
Apparently in many places, people are deeply scandalized by the notion that such sinners could blessed together as sinners (as opposed to separately as sinners), so they have completely missed the actual intent and import of the document.
To even begin to compare this to Humanae Vitae in terms of its "holding the line" against the odds, is laughable.
Back in the Pauline Pontifcate, literally everyone - literally everyone inside the Church and outside the Church - was fully expecting a complete moral endorsement of contraception right to the very moment his (already anticipated) encyclical was released. Paul VI might have been the only person on the planet committed to remaining faithful to the Church's teaching on the dignity of Human Life. He was the Lot, the last righteous man remaining in the city, so to speak. People openly rebelled - clerics of all ranks, politicians, Catholic professionals in the sciences and medicine.
In the Church nowadays, there are many bastions still defending the orthodox and clear Catholic position on marriage, homosexual acts, irregular situations, scandal, blessings, and whatnot. Francis is not a friend to such persons. This document is so heavily laden with hyper-nuance and caveats and qualifiers that it leaves a remarkable amount of wiggle room for it to spun and abused to do the opposite of what it says in (supposedly) plain text. The fact that the Belgians and the Germans are feeling bolstered by Fiducia Supplicans completely refutes your idea that this is a landmark document defending orthodoxy and ensuring continuity of teaching.
I think his point is that now twice under the Francis pontificate there is written doctrine confirming the Church’s orthodox position on marriage and against homosexual and irregular unions and that the Holy Spirit will use that for the good of the Church. It’s a beautiful, hopeful perspective and I’m grateful to him for sharing it.
It had also occurred to me that the Holy Spirit will also use the provision that puts so much on individual pastors—which seems and is a terrible thing to do—to sift sheep from goats.
My husband and I were talking about concern over the next pope and where the ship turns from here—because it feels like straight off the edge of the world. But then I remembered while the College might presently be being remade one by one in a direction I don’t prefer, the presbyterate is full of young, holy priests, and the future College will be called from among them.
I don’t know. It all feels like such a mess today and gives every appearance of being one. Satan wants us to wallow in that feeling and cast off the joy we just committed to on Sunday and to allow that anger and despair to color our actions. And yet, the living God of the universe makes beautiful things out of dust and has promised us that the gates of hell shall not prevail against us and has given us a documented history of many, many times the church should have died and did not. This document and this pontificate are not the end of the story, whether the near effect is renewal or schism. We are still the Church. God is still God.
Are you saying that [with the publication of Fiducia Supplicans] “Satan wants us to wallow in that feeling and cast off the joy we just committed to on Sunday and to allow that anger and despair to color our actions”?
If so, wouldn’t that make Fernandez and Bergoglio agents of Satan?
No, I am not saying that and would not say that. What I am saying is that I, and I assume others but am perhaps out of line in assuming so, felt shock and even temptation to despair at the issuance of FS because it gives the appearance of being a vehicle that binds the Church to the practical living of heresy in spirit even though it avoids it in letter. And that perception of Monday’s events is a large temptation to despair for me and perhaps others.
I can be tempted to despair over this or over not making a red light. In both situations, the actor is me, not the external. It is I who choose to accept or to reject the provocations of the enemy, and the other’s goodness or absence of goodness or even inability to be anything at all as in the case of a traffic light is not the deciding factor.
To build the argument that I would be tempted to despair specifically because the pope and a cardinal are “agents of Satan” would be to make the massively prideful and lethal assumption that I myself am so good that I can only be corrupted by something that is wholly bad, and that is simply not the case. Though the grace of Christ is in me, I am not yet a saint and my will is still perfectly capable of making a mess of anything that comes before me. God could send me a blessing and I could curse it. That certainly wouldn’t make God the bad actor. It’s still me.
To clarify, yes I am saying that I think Satan wants us to wallow in despair. No, I am not saying I think the pope and cardinal are agents of Satan or that any choice of mine to wallow in despair necessitates that they be so. If any of my responses have been flawed or misleading as to my intended point, I apologize. If you can refine my logic, I welcome your feedback.
The first pope was called Satan by Our Lord once (though this was before he received the Holy Spirit and apostolic authority), and opposed to his face by another bishop at least once. If that happened to the first pope why can it not happen to his successors who presumably have less grace than an apostle?
I humbly submit that there is a lack of clear exhortation to reform and repent in Fiducia Supplicans and this will need to be clarified in the near future by the magisterium. The very title, "On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings" indicates that this is written to pastors, and not the lay faithful. The opening words are beautiful, "The supplicating trust of the faithful People of God" and imply that we are but poor beggars and in need of reform. And, I think any priest or bishop instinctively wants to reach out to all people, such as those who have same-sex attraction. But, can this happen without some reform? Pastorally guiding the morally weak in God's infinite love is indeed a good and noble thing, but it must include a call to moral perfectability and a universal call to holiness. This is the central weakness of a declaration which instructs pastors to freely offer blessings to any and all who may seek a blessing regardless of intent to reform, and appears to assign "narcissistic and authoritarian elitism" (25) to a cleric who might choose to refrain from offering one for a very good, longer range, pastoral reason. (For example, I might choose not to bless the rings of a civilly-only married couple in the hopes that the couple will soon seek to confect the Sacrament of Matrimony.) FS could create a dangerous “hall pass” for many people who really might need and want to make some serious changes in lifestyle. Think about a dual drug and porn addict. We don’t bless a young guy and say to him: “May God bless you in your porn and meth addiction! Be at peace as you as you do meth and enjoy your porn...after all, who am I to judge?" No, we want this young man to be free of those addictions so that he can follow Christ and find joy in the good life. FS creates problematic pastoral situations for pastors whereby a homosexual couple – or anyone immersed in an irregular or sinful lifestyle - will now assume that the moral fight is over, and, well, "since I got a special blessing, there is no further need for my reform."
May God bless us all as we seek to understand and strive for holiness in these dark and confusing times.
You are right. There is an implied call to repentance within the document. But it is easy enough to ignore and a lot of the usual suspects are doing just that.
So then how does a priest offer a conforming blessing? I'd like to poll the audience on which of the following prayers are permissible under Fiducia Supplicans:
Option 1: Father, we acknowledge our need for your love and mercy. I ask your blessing on your children, Adam and Steve, to give them the grace to strive for holiness and reject all that is contrary to the Gospel. Bless them with chastity and fortitude.
Option 2: Father, I thank you for the gift of Adam and Steve and their witness of love. May their commitment to each other in good times and bad, for better or for worse, remind them of your fidelity to your children. As they care for each other, may your blessing be upon them.
Please reply with either a 1, 2 or both.
I think only 1 is allowed. The language of the marital views used in the second tips it into resemblance of a marriage ceremony in my opinion.
It's truly heartbreaking to watch the Catholic Church embrace the errors of liberal protestantism with respect to homosexuality. No protestant sect that has gone down this road is thriving. It's institutional suicide. Despite all the hair-splitting and legalese in Fiducia Supplicans, and the sincere but-wrongheaded insistence that nothing in Church teaching about marriage and sexuality have changed, the newspaper headlines and radio reports have got it right. Forget de jure. The de facto result here is that the leaders of Catholic Church in the Vatican have raised the white flag and surrendered to the LGBT agenda. Period. This isn't the end point. This is just the beginning. We are now approximately where the Episcopalians and liberal national churches of Scandinavia were 30 years ago. Unless a miracle occurs, and the Vatican changes course, there's a fairly good chance that, say, 30 years from now, your local diocesan bishop, will be married to a male partner. That's the trajectory on which the Church officially embarked yesterday.
The Lutheran "Bishop" of Stockholm was a lady "married" to another lady. I recall my visit to the stunning Gustav Vasa church in central Stockholm in 2013 for the main Sunday morning liturgy. Maybe 15 people present in this cathedral scale church.
I concur wholeheartedly! Like the Vatican's pusillanimous concordat with the Chinese Communist Party, nothing good will come of this concordat with the Lavender Mafia. The usual suspects are calling it a "good first step" and clamoring for more explicit terms of surrender. The liberal protestant communities are proof that "progressivism" will hollow out your religion and wear its skin like a trophy!
This is like watching the Catholic Church's own version of the LDS Official Declaration 2 from 1978.
The Church is frantically trying to convince us "no, this isn't what it looks like, this is completely fine!" and everybody else looking at it thinks "yeah right, this is obviously you changing your stance."
People back then didn't buy it about "the LDS and the Blacks," and they're not buying it now about "the Catholics and the gays."
The irreverant comedy musical "Book of Mormon" has a tongue-in-cheek line: "And in 1978 God changed his mind about Black People!" now people are looking at us and chiming in "And in 2023 God changed his mind about gay people!"
We already have the wickedly funny Lutheran Satires channel on Youtube. I recommend the video where Luther and Zwingli have a ferocious debate on the Real Presence in rap form. Frank the Hippie Pope appears in older videos, which lampoon Pope Francis' worst early howlers (like Who am I to judge). The LS creators have ample raw material to let Pope Francis explain how FS changes nothing, but really changes everything.
Thanks to Providence, which has countered much of this pontificate with the symbolic weight of Pope Benedict. I believe that blessings can be conferred in practice to people in mortal sin (e.g., at the end of Mass, it is given to all), so the declaration doesn't teach anything heterodox. However, from a pastoral perspective, I cannot see how it's anything but a catastrophe. I am genuinely concerned about divorced Catholics or Catholics with same-sex attraction or who lead a chaste life. How is this Fiducia Suppliant not a slap in their faces?
The blessing at Mass is not a good analogy, since the two are quite unlike each other. Of course in the context of liturgy there is a blessing on the faithful who have gathered to celebrate that liturgy. This does not mean that everyone who attends Mass has to pass some kind of moral purity test. Far from it. But suppose they weren’t there to celebrate a liturgy but rather to do something sinful. Let’s say it’s an abortionists’ conference to take a serious but pretty obvious example, or a gathering of people plotting to embezzle money or the like, to take a milder case. Is it not the case that this document would permit a non-liturgical blessing in these cases? After all, I’m sure there are glimmers of goodness and truth even among people who would attend such a gathering. If the abortionists asked for a blessing for their assembly from a priest, could he refuse?
The consensus position among some of the comments here seems to be that the document is orthodox. This does not seem clear to me at all. It’s one thing to bless individual sinners. It seems quite another thing to bless gatherings of people whose very purpose in the gathering is the commission of serious sin. The fact that there are hard cases among, say, the divorced and remarried with children does not change this basic dynamic.
I will divide my answers into two parts: first on the blessings and second on the "union."
Blessings, properly speaking, belong to what is known as 'quasi sacraments' (the document vaguely mentions this). Quasi sacraments can be conferred on people in mortal sin, including manifested sinners. A notable example is the Christian Funeral, also a quasi sacrament, which is not denied to manifested sinners who did not die reconciled to the Church. Historically, there was a prohibition on Christian Funerals for manifested usurers, murderers, concubines, and those who committed suicide. However, the prohibition was justified by the aim of avoiding scandal. When the prohibition was loosened, it was specified that it should not cause scandal, and to this day, a priest has the right to refuse a Christian Funeral for manifested sinners if he believes it may scandalize the faithful (1983 Canon Law no. 1184; 1917 Canon Law no. 1240; DDF Decree dated Sept. 20, 1973).
Whether through a universal prohibition or a priest exercising pastoral discretion, both cases fall under canon law rather than magisterial authority. The magisterial aspect lies in the recognition that quasi sacraments can be conferred on manifested sinners, including, in some cases, non-Christians, with the caveat of avoiding scandal. Canon Law plays a role in either introducing a universal prohibition or easing it.
Second, on unions: to have an object blessed, the object must first exist. Unions, whether between a man and his mistress or two homosexuals, do not, ontologically speaking, exist to be blessed.
In proper Catholic understanding, the DDF distinguished between de facto and de jure language. The language used is on a de facto basis (similar to when the Church refers to "Protestant" churches—they only exist de facto, but ontologically, before God, only the One Catholic Church exists hence they are our catholic brothers, albite astray. See Bl. Pope Pius IX letters to EO and protestants in 1869).
Since the union does not exist beyond the de facto level, the blessing is automatically for the individuals who are in mortal sin and cannot be anything beyond. Blessings are granted to all, even to the non-baptized if they asked for it in goodwill (See note above).
Would your average Catholic dude understand this sophisticated theology? No. Did the DDF err in using "street language" without introducing any qualifications? Yes.
On the contrary, a group of abortionists does ontologically exist, so a distinction between what is de facto and what is de jure cannot be established. For the psalmist says, "a gang of evildoers has closed in on me" (22:16), and Revelation refers to a "Synagouge of Satan" (2:9) so Scripture teaches us that an organization of evil may ontologically exist and, therefore, cannot be blessed, even if its members are not equal in culpability or have some individual merits.
I hope this would help.
Thank you for this thorough reply. I wonder what the reaction would have been if the declaration included the statement that “same-sex unions do not exist and cannot (properly speaking) be blessed.” I think I follow your argument, but I am certain this subtle point will not be observed in practice. It would have been helpful, for instance, to say that properly speaking only the individuals are blessed since the union doesn’t exist, but the document speaks in plain terms of “same-sex couples,” granting them, as you say, a de facto existence. Are there previous magisterial documents that do so? The way you describe the existence of Protestant ecclesial communities (de facto but not de jure) also strikes me as being rather different from the way these things are usually described in recent Vatican documents. Does this clever distinction between “jus” and “factum” not lose some of its savor if it is never made? Why should the declaration go to such great pains to lay out the conditions for the blessings if the distinction you describe is truly in the background?
Your answer raises another difficulty with the declaration. As you say, a blessing is a quasi-sacrament. If we just translate that into plainer English, it is “like a” sacrament. This also strikes me as patently true just for the average non-sophisticated layman like myself. When I had a priest come bless my house after moving in, I did so because I wished the church’s sacramental economy to be visited there. But paragraph 36 cautions that the blessing should not become similar to a sacrament. This seems incoherent based on the plain meaning of “blessing.” Sam Howard recently pointed out on X that the instruction to the Book of Blessings describes all blessings as liturgical!
Thank you again for your interesting answer. Let’s see how this all develops.
Grazie a te, as we say in Italy, dude! Just to clarify, I am not defending this Fiducia. In my opinion, it scandalizes the faithful and creates unnecessary confusion. It is vague and incoherent, signifying to me a generational crisis within the Church.
Indeed, as you mentioned, it is sad that the declaration did not use proper Catholic language. I am inclined to say that this is to be politically correct and "pastorally" rather than "theologically" oriented as the declaration's subtitle suggests.
The distinction itself dates back to ancient philosophy like Aristotle's Metaphysics and later, St. Thomas. The example I provided is from Blessed Pope Pius IX, as cited above, and Pope Benedict explaining Vatican II's Nostra Aetate Declaration. This is what I can recall from my memory at the moment.
On quasi-sacraments, including what we call in the Latin West as "Sacramentals," they indeed invoke the name of our merciful God to be involved in our life events, homes, businesses, activities, etc., as you rightly did.
I would like to take this chance to wish you a very merry Christmas, bro!
two human beings request a blessing from a priest, I wish that everyone would request a blessing. stop all this noise.
Rejoice and be Glad!!
How naive can you be? ANY action from the church must be clear and above reproach. An ambiguous declaration like this is the absolute worst news coming out of the Vatican. Sin is sin. The Catechism is the Catechism. The Bible is the Bible. God is God.
No one will change their own behavior as a result of FS. The only result is that people doing the wrong thing will be emboldened and encourages in their self- and other-destruction.
This is the most telling quote, from the Vatican itself:
“The origin of the declaration is evangelical,” wrote the Dicastery for Communication’s editorial director. “On almost every page of the Gospel, Jesus breaks traditions and religious prescriptions, respectability, and social conventions. He performs actions that scandalize the self-righteous, the so-called ‘pure,’ those who shield themselves with norms and rules to distance, reject, and close doors.”
They are telling us what they think of the document. It is MEANT to scandalize the self-righteous (by which I guess he means those of us in heteronormative relationships who try to avoid mortal sin). There is a derisive tone when he says "so called 'pure.'" Like people can only be so-called pure. It feels like a slap in the face to those of us who are attempting - using the norms and rules of our Church and Creed - to HOLD FAST to that which was taught us, by pure and holy saints and martyrs. Should I not distance myself and my children from SIN? Should I not REJECT the perverse nature of the world and CLOSE THE DOOR to that? How is this a call to HOLINESS?
I keep telling myself the quote from Padre Pio - "Pray, hope and don't worry" but I DO feel the foundations of the One, True, Catholic and Apostolic church shifting beneath my feet. Part of the reason I became Catholic 23 years ago was because I saw in Her a bastion against the capitulation of the rest of the Christian world to relativism. And now....
Did Jesus "break traditions and religious prescriptions"? I thought he followed the law. He was in the upper room with his disciples fulfilling the Law, not breaking it. He frequently sent those he healed to the temple to complete the religious prescriptions. Have these people read the gospels at all? Each step of his life followed the law set in place. He, Christ, is its fulfillment.
Please don't put "make-up on this pig." This is awful.
If one wants the "proper interpretation" of FS, it's the picture in the New York Times the very next day of Fr JM SJ blessing a couple who are long-time friends of his. Every step is calculated.
Can anyone doubt that Fr JM SJ was kept in the loop every step of the way by his confrere in Rome and that he lined up his friends in advance for the photo op with the NYT?
The two Spanish bishops are splitting hairs.
No matter what is said, how much
catechsis is given, or deflections offered most people will see these as blessings of couples in inappropriate or irregular unions.
I hadn't realized the article was being updated.