- Apr 11, 2005
- 72,844
- 9,381
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Private
This is a simplified history.
What’s the background?
In 2021, the Vatican’s doctrinal office issued a document known as a “responsum,” replying to the question of whether the Church has “the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex.”Its answer was “negative” — and the reasoning for that answer was set out in an accompanying “explanatory note.” The intervention, which was approved by Pope Francis, generated protests among Catholics in countries where same-sex blessings are common practice, especially Germany.
Despite the ruling, bishops in both Germany and neighboring Belgium began to advance contrasting proposals for the regulation of same-sex blessings, raising the topic’s profile among Catholics worldwide.
In July this year, Pope Francis himself addressed the issue, in response to a series of question from five cardinals.
The pope wrote 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.”
But he added that it was “not appropriate for a diocese, a bishops’ conference, or any other ecclesial structure to constantly and officially establish procedures or rituals for all kinds of matters.”
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Fernández said that the pope’s July response, which was issued while the declaration was being studied, “provided important clarifications for this reflection and represents a decisive element for the work” of the doctrinal dicastery.
The cardinal insisted that, like the July response, “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.”
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In its first section, The Blessing in the Sacrament of Marriage, the text rules out any “rites and prayers that could create confusion” between marriage and other forms of union not recognized by the Church. It underlines the validity of “the perennial Catholic doctrine of marriage.”
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Regarding the liturgical meaning of blessings, it says that a liturgical blessing “requires that what is blessed be conformed to God’s will, as expressed in the teachings of the Church.”
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“For this reason, since the Church has always considered only those sexual relations that are lived out within marriage to be morally licit, the Church does not have the power to confer its liturgical blessing when that would somehow offer a form of moral legitimacy to a union that presumes to be a marriage or to an extra-marital sexual practice.”
‘Fiducia supplicans’: What does it say?
What did the Vatican actually say about blessing 'same-sex couples'?
www.pillarcatholic.com
