Why everyone’s talking about BLESSINGS What to make of the various reactions and interpretations prompted by the new Vatican document Fiducia Supplicans. BY ANGELUS STAFF 10 • ANGELUS • <strong>January</strong> <strong>12</strong>, <strong>2024</strong>
While it grabbed the world’s attention when it was released just a week before Christmas, the rollout for Fiducia Supplicans did not seem to go as the Vatican planned. With its Latin title meaning “Supplicating Trust,” the 5,000-word document issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith with the approval of Pope Francis was billed as a sort of Pope Francis waves to an estimated 70,000 people gathered in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican for his Christmas blessing Urbi et Orbi (“to the city and the world”) Dec. 25, 2023. | CNS/VATICAN MEDIA explainer on the “pastoral meaning of blessings.” Specifically, it sought to address a thorny everyday question faced by priests worldwide: Under what conditions are they allowed to offer blessings to people who are living in “irregular” relationships outside the Church’s teachings on marriage, especially those who are divorced and remarried, and same-sex couples? While the document takes pains to explain that it is not changing the Church’s “perennial teaching” on marriage and that “the Church does not have the power to impart blessings on unions of persons of the same sex,” that has not stopped a firestorm of response from Church officials and ordinary Catholics. Indeed, since its publication Dec. 18, Fiducia Supplicans would seem to have raised as many questions as it claimed to answer, provoking a dizzying array of interpretations and reactions on every continent. Father James Martin, SJ, a widely recognized advocate for homosexuals in the Church, performed a same-sex couple “blessing” the day after the document was published, and invited The New York Times to his Manhattan residence to cover it. The Times’ frontpage story declared: “Gay Catholics Hear History: ‘God Bless You’.” Other activists heralded the document as a milestone on the road to the Church’s ultimate acceptance of same-sex marriage. But others have come out against the document on just that point, claiming that in its willingness to entertain the blessing of those in “irregular” situations, it undermines Church teaching on marriage and marks an abrupt reversal of a 2021 statement by the same Vatican doctrine office on the same topic that bluntly declared: “God cannot bless sin.” In their responses, Catholic bishops in parts of Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe rejected the new “horizon” for such blessings outlined by Fiducia Supplicans as incompatible with the Church’s teaching on homosexuality and sexual relations outside the marriage of one man and one woman. Some bishops’ conferences have responded by explicitly banning the blessing of same-sex couples, among them the Ivory Coast and Kazakhstan. Other critics questioned the declaration’s length, its avoidance of terms like “conversion” and “sin,” and the unusual timing of its release a week before Christmas. More tradition-minded Protestant voices also expressed concern. In an open letter to Francis, the American Black Pentecostal leader, Rev. Eugene Rivers III, expressed “alarm and anguish,” urging the pontiff to withdraw the document because it “contradicts the truths of the Holy Bible.” “Already,” Rivers said, the document is “almost universally being interpreted as approving the blessing of sexual sin; indeed, it invites the inference that it was meant to be interpreted thus.” In the face of the controversy, the doctrine office’s prefect and document author, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, took to media interviews to “clarify” the document’s intentions, at one point saying that it was meant to respond to doctrinally questionable same-sex blessings being pushed by bishops and priests in Germany. Finally, on Jan. 4, the doctrine office was forced to publish a long statement, nearly half as long as the original document, explicitly denying charges that it was “heretical” or “blasphemous.” “The document is clear and definitive about marriage and sexuality … ‘not allowing any type of liturgical rite or blessing similar to a liturgical rite that can create confusion,’ ” the statement insisted. “We are talking about something that lasts about 10 or 15 seconds,” it added. “Does it make sense to deny these kinds of blessings to these two people who ask for them? Is it not more appropriate to support their faith, whether it be small or great, to assist them in their weaknesses with a divine blessing, and to channel that openness to transcendence which could lead them to be more faithful to the Gospel?” The controversy is ongoing. To better understand what it does and doesn’t say, we encourage readers to read the document itself at the Vatican website (Vatican.va). Here we offer a sampling of notable comments reflecting the broad outlines of the debate. <strong>January</strong> <strong>12</strong>, <strong>2024</strong> • ANGELUS • 11