Where is the Rome-Germany blessings battle heading?
After years of being outmanoeuvred, has the Vatican decided to keep pace with the Germans?
Vatican doctrinal chief Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández cranked up the pressure on Germany’s bishops Wednesday with a new statement on the country’s guidelines on blessings for unmarried and same-sex couples.
Fernández told Vatican News May 6 that his November 2024 letter criticizing a draft of the German blessings guidelines — published earlier this week with Pope Leo XIV’s agreement — also applied to the final text published in April 2025.
The Argentine cardinal explained that the 2024 letter was the doctrinal dicastery’s “one and only final response” to the German blessings document, in both its draft and final forms.
“What was said in that letter also applies to the text of the current Vademecum [guidelines], which does not have the approval of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith,” he commented.
What specifically does the Vatican object to in both versions of the German guidelines? To answer that, it’s useful to know something about the history of couples’ blessings in Germany and why the practice has taken on such symbolic significance in the country.
A brief history of blessings
It’s hard to identify a precise date on which blessings for unmarried and same-sex couples became a major topic in the German Church. But one contender is May 9, 2015.
That was the day that members of the Central Committee of German Catholics — the influential lay umbrella body known by its German initials, ZdK — adopted a declaration calling for “the further development of liturgical forms, particularly blessings for same-sex partnerships, new partnerships involving divorced individuals, and for important milestones in family life.”
It was arguably at this point, two years into the pontificate of Pope Francis, that blessings became what German Catholics call a “Church-political” (kirchenpolitische) issue. This might be roughly translated as an internal Church policy debate: a subject that’s up for grabs, that fires up activists, and generates resistance.
The reaction to the ZdK declaration is interesting in hindsight. Munich’s Cardinal Reinhard Marx — who arguably triggered the most recent Vatican intervention with his endorsement of the 2025 guidelines — strongly criticized the declaration.
“The call for the blessing of same-sex partnerships and a second marriage not recognized by the Church is incompatible with the Church’s doctrine and tradition,” said Marx, the then-chairman of the German bishops’ conference.
For years before the ZdK declaration, individual Catholic parishes in Germany had offered blessing ceremonies aimed at unmarried and same-sex couples. But the lay body’s formal endorsement brought more media attention to the practice, giving it added momentum as a kirchenpolitische issue.
The practice caught Rome’s attention too, prompting the Vatican’s doctrinal office to declare in 2021 that the Church did not have the power to bless same-sex couples.
In response, German priests and pastoral workers organized a day of protest, conducting blessing ceremonies attended by same-sex couples.
Critics of the initiative included Bishop Georg Bätzing, Marx’s successor as bishops’ conference chairman, who said it was not a “helpful sign,” although he supported blessing ceremonies in principle.
Same-sex blessings were one of the central topics at Germany’s “synodal way,” a multi-year initiative that brought together the country’s bishops and select lay people to discuss sweeping changes to Catholic teaching and practice.
In March 2023, synodal way participants adopted a resolution on “blessing ceremonies for couples who love each other,” which called for the official introduction of blessing ceremonies in all German parishes.
The resolution noted that the bishops’ conference and the ZdK were preparing a handout that would include “suggested forms for blessing celebrations for various couple situations (remarried couples, same-sex couples, couples after civil marriage).”
The resolution argued that this step was necessary because of a demand for blessings among civilly remarried and same-sex couples.
“The assessment of the diversity of lasting relationships and the mutual responsibility perceived in them has changed in Germany,” it noted.
“Partnerships that are binding and loving are met with a high level of social acceptance — irrespective of a previous union or the gender of the two partners. This esteem must also find a convincing expression in the liturgy of the Church.”
It added: “Often same-sex couples and remarried divorcees have experienced exclusion and depreciation in our Church. The possibility of publicly placing their partnership under God’s blessing does not make up for these experiences. However, it offers the Church the opportunity to show appreciation for the love and values that exist in these relationships and thus make reconciliation possible.”
Blessings had by now become a litmus test of the Church’s acceptance of changing mores in Germany. If blessing ceremonies could be officially instituted, then other adaptations to changing social values would be easier to adopt.
In May 2023, the Working Group for Catholic Family Education, a professional association promoting pastoral care for families in the Church in Germany, published a template for blessing ceremonies. The 52-page document included liturgical texts that, according to critics, resembled a church wedding ceremony.
It seemed at this point that the handout requested by the synodal way would take up this template. But the German couples’ blessing project was unexpectedly thrown into disarray in December 2023.
That month, the Vatican’s doctrine office adopted an unexpected new position on blessings, announcing in the declaration Fiducia supplicans that spontaneous “blessings of couples in irregular situations and of couples of the same sex” were permissible.
Following a backlash against the document, led by Catholics in Africa, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith specified that the blessings should last “a few seconds, without an approved ritual and without a book of blessings.”
The German bishops’ conference and the ZdK realized they couldn’t publish the blessings handout requested by the synodal way without taking the new Vatican text into account.
It was around this point that Trier’s Bishop Stephan Ackermann, the chairman of the German bishops’ liturgy commission, corresponded with Vatican doctrinal czar Cardinal Fernández.
In a letter dated Nov. 24, 2024, Fernández said the draft German blessing guidelines were incompatible with Fiducia supplicans. While the draft said blessings should be conferred with “spontaneity and freedom,” it also offered a blessing formula. The German draft guidelines therefore endorsed “a kind of liturgy or para-liturgy” at odds with the Vatican’s 2023 declaration.
The finalized German blessing guidelines were ultimately published in April 2025, but in a rather curious way. They were not issued by the German bishops as a whole, but rather by a body known as the Joint Conference, which periodically brings together a representative group of bishops and ZdK members.
An official press release presented the text merely as a recommendation from the Joint Conference “that the diocesan bishops proceed in accordance with the guidelines.”
Most controversially of all, the document was announced on April 23, 2025, two days after the death of Pope Francis. Critics accused German Church leaders of taking advantage of a papal interregnum to publish a document at odds with the Vatican’s stance on blessings.
The bishops’ conference rejected the claim, pointing out that the document was dated April 4, when Pope Francis had returned from hospital to the Vatican. The text’s supporters also denied that it strayed beyond the limits of Fiducia supplicans, noting the handout said that “no approved liturgical celebrations or prayers are provided for the blessings.”
That did not satisfy the critics. The German Catholic group New Beginning insisted the overall tenor of the document encouraged “a ritual practice,” while “Fiducia supplicans explicitly called for a non-ritual practice.”
German dioceses were split over guidelines. Some formally promulgated it, while others publicly rejected it, creating a confusing patchwork of policies across the country.
Following the publication of the 2024 letter and Cardinal Fernández’s statement to Vatican News, it is now abundantly clear that Rome sides with the dioceses that distanced themselves from the guidelines.
Explaining why the Vatican believes that the criticisms in the 2024 letter also apply to the finalized document, Vatican News said this week: “Indeed, although the final text differs from the original draft, it does not actually incorporate what was written in the 2024 letter because, although it speaks of spontaneity and freedom regarding blessings for extramarital couples, it proposes a kind of liturgy or para-liturgical ritual that is not permitted by the declaration Fiducia Supplicans which was issued in December 2023.”
“That declaration states that with regard to blessings that ‘the Church has the right and the duty to avoid any rite that might contradict this conviction or lead to confusion’ regarding marriage.”
Beyond ‘nein’
German Catholic officials have been noticeably quiet since the Vatican stepped up its criticism of the 2025 guidelines.
After Cardinal Fernández published the 2024 letter on May 4, the German bishops’ conference could have launched a public relations offensive, arguing that the letter applied only to a draft and not the final document.
A German Church spokesman did suggest this to German Catholic media, but seemingly not in a way intended to challenge the Vatican narrative head-on.
Two days after publishing the letter, Fernández shut down that possibility by underlining that the Vatican’s nein to the draft guidelines applied equally to the final text.
Why has the cardinal seemingly adopted a new strategy of rapid rebuttal?
He’s not going out on a limb. He has Pope Leo XIV’s support to press the issue, as the May 6 Vatican News report made clear.
Perhaps it is because Rome has finally tired of the modus operandi of the synodal way’s architects, of establishing “facts on the ground” in Germany and then, when the Vatican intervenes, claiming it is far too late to change them.
After years of being outmanoeuvred, the Vatican may have decided it is going to try to keep up with the German Church’s bureaucratic chicanery, offering a kind of real-time corrective.
Or could the new strategy simply be a sign that there’s not much else the Roman curia can do, other than make it clear that it does not approve of the German blessings project?
In practical terms, there is no way to discourage German parishes from continuing to host blessing ceremonies. The organizers didn’t care that the ceremonies were unauthorized when they launched them. Why would Rome’s opposition bother them now?
Doctrinal office statements also won’t prompt the ZdK’s leadership to rethink its endorsement of blessing ceremonies. That’s because the lay body’s leaders believe the doctrinal dicastery is wrong and they are right.
The Vatican could possibly press the German bishops’ conference to withdraw the guidelines. But it’s likely to argue that they were never officially promulgated in the first place — a plausible position given they were issued during a papal interregnum by a minor bureaucratic body. The conference might also suggest that recalling the document after several bishops have formally endorsed them in their dioceses would be messy.
Yet Rome does have one source of leverage that it could, if it wished, use to great effect.
On March 31, new German bishops’ conference chairman Bishop Heiner Wilmer formally submitted to the Roman curia the statutes for the country’s proposed “synodal conference.”
Establishing the synodal conference — a permanent body of bishops and select lay representatives — is the overarching goal of the synodal way’s organizers. Its creation would embed the synodal way’s mechanisms in the German Church for the foreseeable future. It would give the ZdK and like-minded Catholics a long-cherished status as ecclesiastical decision-makers.
Synodal way supporters believe Vatican approval of the statutes is a given. They are so confident that the synodal conference’s inaugural meeting is already penciled in for Nov. 6-7 in Stuttgart.
But what if the Vatican decided to make its approval conditional? That would, of course, escalate the conflict, arguably contradicting Pope Leo XIV’s goal of restoring peace in the Church. But it would present a dilemma for the synodal way’s champions.
Their instinct would be to protest as vigorously as possible. But how far would they be willing to go, knowing that the synodal way’s crowning goal — the synodal conference — was on the line?