Angelus News | January 12, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 1

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.
January 12, 2024 • ANGELUS • 11