The recent text from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), issued just a week before Christmas, is likely to change, well, a lot. But the changes are not those that most news outlets have reported, at least right away. Fiducia Supplicans does not permit same-sex blessings, at least in the way that almost anyone uses that term (i.e., something like marriage, but not exactly marriage). As a friend said recently, for a document whose goal is to avoid any confusion,[1] it seems nearly impossible that this document will not create a ton of it. Just yesterday, the Episcopal Conference of Catholic bishops in Malawi prohibited the implementation of the blessings within southern Africa and the Archdiocese of Astana in Kazakhstan went as far as to ask the Pope “to revoke the permission to bless couples in an irregular situation and same-sex couples.”
This subject is of particular importance to Anglicans, most especially because the recent developments in the Church of England bear a number of similarities to the approach of Fiducia Supplicans (for a summary of the situation in England, see the recent piece by Andrew Goddard on Covenant and a more recent update here). But the areas that this new Catholic text affects are numerous: the nature of papal teaching authority, ecumenical relations, ecclesiology, the theory of the development of doctrine, just to name a few. But that says nothing of the unofficial implications within the Catholic Church.
In this substantial essay, I begin with a close reading of the text and try to clarify what it says, what it does not say, and what it implies. Next, I focus on the term development, which is a key term that Fiducia Supplicans uses to describe the purpose of the text. Next, I consider the challenges provided by intention: the intention of those who seek such blessings, the intention of those who bestow them, and the relationship of both to the claims of Fiducia Supplicans. I conclude with some conjecture about the ecumenical sources and effects of this declaration and what things might look like in the future.
What Does Fiducia Supplicans Say?
The various teaching organs within the Magisterium of the Catholic Church can issue documents with different levels of authority. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is the curial office tasked with matters of doctrine. Fiducia Supplicans is a type of document called a “Declaration,” which is the highest level that the DDF can issue and which are extremely rare. The last one issued was 23 years ago under Pope John Paul II entitled Dominus Jesus, which centered on the uniqueness of Christ’s salvific work. Before that, one has to go back to 1980 when the CDF issued a Declaration on Euthanasia.
Since the Second Vatican Council, after which the name of the Holy Office was changed to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and then to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith by Pope Francis in June 2022), this office has only issued a total of 11 Declarations, including Fiducia Supplicans: four concern the problematic teaching of particular theologians (Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, Jacques Pohier), while the others concern weighty matters of theology (Christology, Trinitarian theology) or ethics (abortion, euthanasia). While issued by the CDF/DDF, these texts are usually issued with language that indicates that the pope has “ratified” the document, such that he is effectively a co-signer. With the case of Fiducia Supplicans, however, it indicates that the promulgation of the text came within the context of a private audience with the pope (Ex Audientia Die).
As Cardinal Fernández (the Prefect of the DDF) says in his opening to the text, “this Declaration remains firm on the traditional doctrine of the Church about marriage, not allowing any type of liturgical rite or blessing similar to a liturgical rite that can create confusion.” It is worth noting that nearly all the churches that offered same-sex blessings and then made provision for marriage between persons of the same sex did not proceed exactly like this. Even if they did not officially change their doctrine of marriage immediately, there was a reticence to affirm a traditional marriage doctrine as firmly as does Fiducia Supplicans.
The document begins with a reference to a March 15, 2021 text from the DDF, which was a response to certain questions raised by five conversative cardinals to Pope Francis (such questions posed to the Pope are called dubium, “doubts”).The answer to the question, “Does the Church have the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex?,” is unambiguous: “Negative.”
Both this text and Fiducia Supplicans ground the doctrinal sections in a theological argument about blessings. In fact, the title of the document is “On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings.” The Catholic Church’s teaching about blessings is helpfully summarized in the current Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), and both texts rely on the Catechism explicitly.
The form of this teaching has an interesting parallel to the approach of the Second Vatican Council in its teaching on Scripture in the document, Dei verbum. There, the Council grounds the particularity of the revelation of Scripture in the revelation of the Word of God in the person of Jesus Christ. In “Christ the Lord,” “the full revelation of the supreme God is brought to completion (see 2 Cor. 1:20; 3:13; 4:6)” (Dei verbum 7.1). Both Scripture and tradition are distinct and divinely willed expressions of that fundamental revelation:
There exists a close connection and communication between sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture. For both of them, flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end. For Sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit, while sacred tradition takes the word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the Apostles, and hands it on to their successors in its full purity, so that led by the light of the Spirit of truth, they may in proclaiming it preserve this word of God faithfully, explain it, and make it more widely known” (Dei verbum 9).
Scripture is thus rightly called the Word of God most fundamentally because it discloses the fulness of God’s revelation in the incarnate Logos, Jesus Christ.
Analogously, Catholic teaching first grounds its conception of blessing in Trinitarian theology. All blessing derives from the fact that God is blessing to all of creation, most especially in the person of Jesus, as Ephesians 1:3 expresses: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” The response of the human creature to this divine action is also properly described as blessing, which in this case “means adoration and surrender to his Creator in thanksgiving” (CCC 1078). Liturgically, this is given its fullest expression in the Eucharist, when members of the Church offer back to God from the gifts given to us — “which earth have given and human hands have made” — symbols of the whole creation, which God returns to us as the very Body and Blood of his Son. “From the beginning until the end of time,” the Catechism adds, “the whole of God’s work is a blessing” (CCC 1079).
When it comes to the action of the church, there are blessings that are intrinsic parts of certain Sacraments, most especially in the Eucharist and in the Sacrament of Marriage. In Catholic teaching, blessings outside the Sacraments are called “sacramentals,” which are defined as “sacred signs which bear a resemblance to the sacraments. They signify effects, particularly of a spiritual nature, which are obtained through the intercession of the Church. By them men are disposed to receive the chief effect of the sacraments, and various occasions in life are rendered holy” (CCC 1667).
Non-sacramental blessings (sacramentals … yes, it’s a bit confusing!) are not all created equal. Some consecrate persons to particular holy service to God, such as “the blessing of the abbot or abbess of a monastery, the consecration of virgins, the rite of religious profession and the blessing of certain ministries of the Church (readers, acolytes, catechists, etc.).” Other blessings consecrate objects to a particular sacred task, such “the dedication or blessing of a church or an altar, the blessing of holy oils, vessels, and vestments, bells, etc., can be mentioned as examples of blessings that concern objects” (CCC 1672).
This means that there are clear criteria about what can and cannot be blessed, as the dubia makes quite clear:
In order to conform with the nature of sacramentals, when a blessing is invoked on particular human relationships, in addition to the right intention of those who participate, it is necessary that what is blessed be objectively and positively ordered to receive and express grace, according to the designs of God inscribed in creation, and fully revealed by Christ the Lord. Therefore, only those realities which are in themselves ordered to serve those ends are congruent with the essence of the blessing imparted by the Church.
Despite what Franklin Graham said on Twitter, it seems that he and the pope and these documents all agree:
Since blessings on persons are in relationship with the sacraments, the blessing of homosexual unions cannot be considered licit. This is because they would constitute a certain imitation or analogue of the nuptial blessing invoked on the man and woman united in the sacrament of Matrimony, while in fact “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family” (response to the dubia).
Or as Fiducia Supplicans puts it, “the Church does not have the power to impart blessings on unions of persons of the same sex.”
To summarize, these texts parse a number of distinctions between types of blessings:
- Some blessings are constitutive of particular sacraments, such as the blessing of bread and wine and their transformation into the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist and the nuptial blessing in Holy Matrimony.
- Many sacramentals are blessings, and their purpose is to dispose Christians toward the sacraments and ultimately toward God himself. This includes the blessing of homes, of devotional objects like rosaries, medals, crosses, etc.
- Still a further distinction is explained in Fiducia Supplicans: there is a distinction between blessings that have been promulgated by the Church in formal liturgical texts (the most common of these being The Book of Blessings) and the response of a priest to people who ask for a blessing that is improvised or generic (e.g. “The Lord bless you and keep you”). While not as common within Anglicanism, it is normal in many Catholic contexts for a pious person when encountering a priest or bishop to ask for a blessing. The purpose of such a blessing is not exactly the same as the blessing of rosary or a pulpit. Here, as Fiducia Supplicans explains, “To seek a blessing in the Church is to acknowledge that the life of the Church springs from the womb of God’s mercy and helps us to move forward, to live better, and to respond to the Lord’s will.”
It seems that the theological point being made is that if I encounter a priest at a train station and ask him for a blessing, that blessing does not imply any sort of endorsement of my actions or my theology. Rather, it is acknowledgment that God is blessing all of his creatures and is the source of all blessing and that we are in need of all that God gives (which is everything!).
So far, none of this is new. A whole range of Catholic theologians would likely agree that this is standard Catholic teaching. In fact, one might ask why a document is needed to tell priests that they can do something that they always thought they could and should do: give a blessing when someone asks. It’s not as strange as issuing a document telling priests that, yes, they are allowed to walk, drive a car, or even ride a bicycle to the church in order to say Mass, but it’s getting close.
But is that all that Fiducia Supplicans says?
Development?
The needle that Pope Francis and the document seek to thread is to leave intact the traditional doctrine of marriage and to be able to respond to same-sex couples. He already signaled this in a September 25 response to further dubium from a group of cardinals. There he faced a question of whether the church could derogate from the principal of its traditional view of marriage by treating it “as a mere ideal, and accepting as a ‘possible good’ objectively sinful situations, such as same-sex unions, without betraying revealed doctrine.” He replied that “pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are forms of blessing, requested by one or more persons, that do not convey an erroneous conception of marriage.”
Fiducia Supplicans expands this further. The introduction of the document makes a very significant claim:
The value of this document, however, is that it offers a specific and innovative contribution to the pastoral meaning of blessings, permitting a broadening and enrichment of the classical understanding of blessings, which is closely linked to a liturgical perspective. Such theological reflection, based on the pastoral vision of Pope Francis, implies a real development from what has been said about blessings in the Magisterium and the official texts of the Church. This explains why this text has taken on the typology of a “Declaration” (emphasis added).
The text claims that Fiducia Supplicans makes three noteworthy claims:
- this document constitutes a development in the pastoral theology of blessings;
- this development goes beyond what has been said thus far by the Magisterium and the official texts of the Church; and
- this development is based on the pastoral vision of Pope Francis.
So what are these developments?
Pope Francis in Fiducia Supplicans proposes a particular way of framing the third kind of blessing, the one in which an individual encounters a priest and requests a blessing and which the text describes in this way:
When one asks for a blessing, one is expressing a petition for God’s assistance, a plea to live better, and confidence in a Father who can help us live better. This request should, in every way, be valued, accompanied, and received with gratitude. People who come spontaneously to ask for a blessing show by this request their sincere openness to transcendence, the confidence of their hearts that they do not trust in their own strength alone, their need for God, and their desire to break out of the narrow confines of this world, enclosed in its limitations” (Fiducia Supplicans 21).
Again, it’s difficult to see how any prayerful pastor would disagree. But most pastors also have experienced cases in which things are actually much more complicated. I recall a priest describing an experience in the confessional when a penitent was seeking forgiveness for adultery. But as the person continued, it became clear that the person was going to continue the adulterous relationship. The penitent felt guilty, but had no intention of changing this behavior. This is not necessarily the same thing as a same-sex couple seeking a blessing. Rather, it reminds us that the desires people have and what they seek from God and the Church are often quite mixed and complicated and can be in substantial tension with what the Church understands itself to be doing (more on this later).
Maybe the most difficult passage to interpret is paragraph 25:
The Church, moreover, must shy away from resting its pastoral praxis on the fixed nature of certain doctrinal or disciplinary schemes, especially when they lead to “a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying.”[2] Thus, when people ask for a blessing, an exhaustive moral analysis should not be placed as a precondition for conferring it. For, those seeking a blessing should not be required to have prior moral perfection.
There are at least two important things to say about this paragraph. First, the text implies that many ways in which a priest may rely on “certain doctrinal or disciplinary schemes” will be in tension with proper “pastoral praxis” and may lead to “a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism.” This raises a question: What sort of reliance on doctrine and discipline does not lead to these deficiencies?
Second, the text seems to set pastoral praxis and doctrine (and its consequences as spelled out in canon law) as realities that may be in direct opposition to one another. In fact, it seems to imply that a proper pastoral response in this case will be in tension with “certain doctrinal or disciplinary schemes,” the very schemes laid out in the dubia response and in the earlier portions of Fiducia Supplicans. That certainly would constitute a certain kind of development that clearly goes beyond what has been said thus far by the Magisterium and the official texts of the Church. The text further suggests that “Pope Francis proposed a description of this kind of blessing that is offered to all without requiring anything” (Fiducia Supplicans 27). The meaning of that last phrase, “without requiring anything,” is particularly opaque.
The fact that this development goes beyond what has been said thus far by the Magisterium and the official texts of the Church is clear in the footnotes. Of the 31 quotations or citations, 20 are from Pope Francis (more on this below).
Section III, “Blessings of Couples in Irregular Situations and of Couples of the Same Sex,” puts a great deal of weight on the distinction between forms “fixed ritually by ecclesial authorities” and those that are spontaneous. It further suggests that when such couples seek a blessing, they are not seeking “a legitimation of their own status” but rather to “beg that all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit.” The basic principle is that “God never turns away anyone who approaches him,” which all faithful Christians know to be true.
To call this a “development” is not a small matter. Especially in the wake of the influential Essay on the Development of Doctrine by the Anglican convert John Henry Newman, “development” in doctrine is a matter that dogmatic and systematic theologians have discussed vigorously and it has become a technical term in theology. But the difficulty is actually pinning down precisely what is the development in Fiducia Supplicans. The text simply does not say clearly what this development is.
The most uncomfortable conclusion is that the development named by Fiducia Supplicans is the claim that proper pastoral praxis (i.e., to bless same-sex couples) is in tension with the doctrine of the Catholic Church and that pastoral praxis should not be based on doctrinal or disciplinary schemes. But what presses back against this is the lengthy articulation of its traditional doctrine of marriage and the claim that the Church cannot bless same-sex unions as such. I have read through this text over and over and I have not yet uncovered how it resolves this seeming contradiction. Neither could Gerhard Ludwig Cardinal Müller, the German prelate who was the previous head of the DDF, who also concludes that Fiducia Supplicans introduces a contradiction that it never resolves.[3] In fact, he concludes with language that could not be stronger: If a priest gives a blessing to a same-sex couple in accord with Fiducia Supplicans, “he would have to give these blessings not as a priest of Christ, but as one who has rejected Christ. … Therefore, he commits a sacrilegious and blasphemous act against the Creator’s plan and against Christ’s death for us, which meant to fulfill the Creator’s plan.”
What further complicates things is that the text of Fiducia Supplicans says that the DDF will not wade into this territory further, which would seem to cut the bishops out of the process of understanding and interpreting the text within the wider context of Catholic teaching.
Regardless of whether my interpretation is correct, the practical challenges and effects that this introduces are numerous.
The Problem of Intention
The first is whether same-sex couples who seek such a blessing do not think that they are seeking God’s blessing on their relationship but instead that “all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit,” excluding all those aspects of their relationship that Catholic teaching states cannot be blessed.
One does not need to be a conservative to wonder whether couples — such as the one legally married in New York and (as reported and photographed by The New York Times) whom the well-known Jesuit priest Fr. James Martin blessed in his Jesuit community residence on Monday morning — actually accept the Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage and are seeking a blessing that would mature them in such a way that … might result in them no longer being in a same-sex relationship? When one descends from the abstract to particular people and couples, squaring this circle seems harder and harder to fathom. And this also highlights how the rites for blessinge same-sex couples (and same-sex marriage) in places like the Episcopal Church are significantly different from Fiducia Supplicans.
Not only is there a likely tension between what Fiducia Supplicans indicates that couples are seeking and what they are actually seeking. There is also a likely tension between what Fiducia Supplicans says priests are offering and what some priests intend to offer. The same New York Times article that shows Fr. Martin blessing a couple quotes another New York priest, the Rev. Joseph Juracek, pastor of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi in Midtown, as saying, “It is about darn time.” He “believes the church is finally aligning with Jesus’ teachings”: “This is what he is all about: That God is for all people.” The response of bishops in places like Austria and Belgium seems to go beyond the extremely fine distinction made in Fiducia Supplicans, while others, such as Archbishop Dražen Kutleša in Croatia, responded in a way that stays within its strictures.
Magisterial and Papal Teaching
One of the key pieces of Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine (and to any basic attempt to make sense of the unfolding and flowering of Christian teaching that assumes that rupture or novelty are problematic) is that the teaching must somehow be embedded in the original deposit of faith, akin to a plant flowering from a seed. G.K. Chesterton summarized this in his typically punchy and non-technical way: “When we say that a puppy develops into a dog, we do not mean that his growth is a gradual compromise with a cat; we mean that he becomes more doggy and not less. Development is the expansion of all the possibilities and implications of a doctrine, as there is time to distinguish them and draw them out” (St. Thomas Aquinas).
There is a double peculiarity in Fiducia Supplicans: this is an official magisterial text that is weighing in on a controverted matter and it is doing so based on one source: the current pope. What makes it rather surprising is that the text not only does not shy away from this fact but actually highlights it!
The value of this document, however, is that it offers a specific and innovative contribution to the pastoral meaning of blessings, permitting a broadening and enrichment of the classical understanding of blessings, which is closely linked to a liturgical perspective. Such theological reflection, based on the pastoral vision of Pope Francis, implies a real development from what has been said about blessings in the Magisterium and the official texts of the Church.
Of the 31 quotations or citations, 20 are from Pope Francis: three are from a Catechesis on Prayer given at a General Audience; nine are from his 2023 response to the dubium raised by the cardinals; three from his post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris Laetitia; one from his Apostolic Exhortation, C’est la Confiance; four are from his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, the text with the highest level of authority from Pope Francis quoted by the document. The papal document with the highest level of authority quoted are the apostolic exhortations; the document does not quote any of his three papal encyclicals, the most authoritative form of papal teaching( outside of the rare instance of teaching ex cathedra, which has only happened twice in history) nor does it quote any council. Of the 11 remaining quotations, five are from the introduction or the text of The Book of Blessings, one from the DDF’s response to the dubia, three from documents from the Congregation for Divine Worship, one from a document from Vatican II, and one from a sermon of Pope Benedict XVI, all of which refer to uncontroverted features of a theology of blessings.
It bears repeating: this form of authoritative text known as a Declaration is quite rare — Fiducia Supplicans is only the eleventh in 58 years; it is very rare for an authoritative text to rely so exclusively on a single theologian, particularly when that theologian is the current pope; it is even more unusual that a text that claims that it is a development in Catholic teaching quotes only one theologian (St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus) and only one other pope (Benedict XVI) — though neither of those citations have a direct bearing on the theological developments made in Fiducia Supplicans. This is all quite unusual.
Despite popular belief that the Bishop of Rome is an infallible dispenser of truth and doctrine every time he speaks, this is not what the Catholic Church teaches. Pope Benedict reminded the church of this: “The Pope is not an oracle; he is infallible in very rare situations, as we know.”
Furthermore, this is also not how the Catholic Church has tended to make arguments, especially on contested questions and in official magisterial texts. A quick glance at the texts of Vatican II and the Catechism reveals a tendency to quote extensively from Scripture and the Church Fathers, in part because it wishes to emphasize that whatever is under consideration is not novel or innovative. In Fiducia Supplicans, the novelty is emphasized. If a document had been issued by the Pope or the Magisterium under Pope John Paul II or Benedict XVI whose footnotes were all self-quotations, this would have been enormous news and seen as a major development (and a major problem). And it would have been enormously worrisome to many, whether liberal or conversative (though for somewhat different reasons).
The methodology of Fiducia Supplicans seems to imply a view of papal teaching that many might argue is in tension with both the texts and the “spirit” of Vatican II. The tendency has been to de-emphasize monarchial papal authority in favor of the collegial activity of the Bishop of Rome within the College of Bishops and the whole people of God. There has been a real tension in Francis’ papacy between the emphasis on collegiality and synodality, on the place of the laity in general, and specifically the marginalized voices of women and the poor, and what even those on the left have described sometimes as authoritarian in the exercise of the pope’s “absolute power” and the further limiting of the authority of the diocesan bishop.
Liberal and conservative Catholics will rightly have reservations about a view of papal authority in which sermons and more official statements of a single pope (who is also the current pope) can serve as the single legitimate source for a significant theological development. This is a far cry from how the Catholic Church teaches about the infallibility of papal teaching, which is extremely circumscribed and limited.[4] Despite the quip by the nineteenth-century Anglican-turned-Catholic William George Ward (“I should like a new papal Bull every morning with my Times at breakfast”),[5] all Catholic theologians know that this is a terrible idea and not how their Church frames the ministry of the papal office. In fact, there is nothing in Catholic teaching that claims the Pope could not say erroneous things every day, even in his official capacity. It would be scandalous and problematic. But the theological claim of papal infallibility declared in the document Pastor aeternus at the First Vatican Council and confirmed at the Second Vatican Council is not that the Pope is preserved from error in anything he speaks, even when that speech is theological. Rather, this infallibility is when
the Roman Pontiff, the head of the college of bishops … in virtue of his office … as the supreme shepherd and teacher of all the faithful … confirms his brethren in their faith, by a definitive act he proclaims a doctrine of faith or morals. … his definitions … are justly styled irreformable, since they are pronounced with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, promised to him in blessed Peter, and therefore they need no approval of others, nor do they allow an appeal to any other judgment. For then the Roman Pontiff is not pronouncing judgment as a private person, but as the supreme teacher of the universal Church, in whom the charism of infallibility of the Church itself is individually present, he is expounding or defending a doctrine of Catholic faith. The infallibility promised to the Church resides also in the body of Bishops, when that body exercises the supreme magisterium with the successor of Peter” (Lumen gentium, 25.3).
The only two times this occurred is when the papal use of when in 1854 the Pope Pius IX declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary and then in 1950, when Pope Pius XII declared the dogma of the Blessed Virgin’s assumption into heaven.
Ecumenical
The desire to thread the needle so that the traditional doctrine of marriage is left intact but coupled with a more radical pastoral response is a shared desire of both Pope Francis and the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. It is well known that they have become close friends (see here and here). In fact, multiple sources have suggested that they discussed this very solution on their flight home from their joint pilgrimage for peace to South Sudan in February 2023 (for more on the pilgrimage, see the official reports here and here). Apparently, the Pope thought the approach in the Church of England — keep the traditional doctrine of marriage intact but make pastoral provision for same-sex couples — was a good idea.
If that is the case, this may be one of the most unexpected forms of Anglican-Roman Catholic ecumenism: the Church of England’s squaring-the-circle solution to a hugely vexing problem serving as the basis for the response to the same situation in the two-billion-plus member Catholic Church. The first known instance a blessing from Living in Love and Faith took place on December 17 at St John the Baptist, Felixstowe. The accompanying photograph of the rite looks just like a nuptial blessing in the rite for Holy Matrimony.
It will be fascinating to see the extent to which this moral question remains a part of the bilateral dialogues between the Catholic Church and other ecclesial bodies. I was on the national Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue that focused on the question of Ecclesiology and Moral Discernment, and this matter was a central question. What will be the effect of its relationship with bodies like the Anglican Church in North America, which was keen to enter into ecumenical dialogue, in part because of Catholicism’s public stance on same-sex marriage? Will this have any effect on the Catholic Church’s dialogues with the various Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches? Substantive answers may not be clear for decades, long after Pope Francis has been succeeded as the Bishop of Rome.
Effects
Everyone who has followed these developments in ecclesial bodies in the West knows that every ecclesial entity that now allows clergy to perform same-sex marriages started with blessings. I was present for an informal meeting of Anglican bishops from different provinces who were discussing the recent developments in the Church of England on this topic. Bishops from both the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada both recounted being in meetings or synodal gatherings when same-sex blessings were being discussed and authorized. “We’re not talking about marriage. Marriage isn’t even on the table! We’re only talking about blessings.” And within a few years, the topic was … same-sex marriage. This is readily acknowledged, both by those who affirm the traditional doctrine of marriage and those with a more progressive view. “Wow! My [Episcopal] friends remember that this is how we started on the slow journey to marriage equality,” wrote a public figure in the Episcopal Church, along with a link to the article in The New York Times that announced the publication of Fiducia Supplicans.
But we must also remember that the Catholic Church is not really like any other church.
What may actually be the case is that Pope Francis is attempting an extremely difficult high-wire act. He knows that the question of same-sex marriage, and related LGBT matters, are a tremendous pastoral challenge to all Christian churches. And he knows that to not respond or to respond by doubling down on “negative” statements will not bear pastoral fruit. It may be that he thinks that some confusion is tolerable in the short term for the sake of people who stand in deep need of God, which is to say, all of us.
Most Christian churches are struggling with this question in varied ways. The Church of England is still in the throes of trying to find a solution. The Episcopal Church will consider some proposals this summer to make sure there is space for both a traditional and a progressive view of marriage. The United Methodist Church is in the midst of the largest denominational division since the Civil War on the question of same-sex marriage.
The vision of Pope Francis does not necessarily fit into the kind of systematic framework that was so natural to his processor, Pope Benedict. But it is clear that he has a deep and abiding concern that the world would know the God of the Scriptures, and Jesus Christ, whom he has sent. As we are in the Ember Days before Christmas, we pray with the rest of the Church:
Almighty God, the giver of all good gifts, in your divine providence you have appointed various orders in your Church: Give your grace, we humbly pray, to all who are called to any office and ministry for your people; and so fill them with the truth of your doctrine and clothe them with holiness of life, that they may faithfully serve before you, to the glory of your great Name and for the benefit of your holy Church; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
[1] “As with the Holy Father’s above-mentioned response to the Dubia of two Cardinals, this Declaration remains firm on the traditional doctrine of the Church about marriage, not allowing any type of liturgical rite or blessing similar to a liturgical rite that can create confusion.”
[2] The document is quoting the apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (24 November 2013), paragraph 94.
[3] I read the Cardinal’s essay just before mine was published. While he makes many interpretations that are similar to mine, my essay was written without consulting his.
[4] Citing both Vatican I and Vatican II, the Catechism explains: “The Roman Pontiff, head of the college of bishops, enjoys this infallibility in virtue of his office, when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful — who confirms his brethren in the faith he proclaims by a definitive act a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals. … the infallibility promised to the Church is also present in the body of bishops when, together with Peter’s successor, they exercise the supreme Magisterium, above all in an Ecumenical Council.”
[5] Quoted in Wilfrid Ward, William George Ward and the Catholic Revival (Gregg International Publishers, 1893), p. 14.
