ROME — Pop music icon Elton John has called out Vatican “hypocrisy” for cashing in on the gay Rocketman biopic while ruling out blessings of homosexual couples.
“How can the Vatican refuse to bless gay marriages because they ‘are sin’, yet happily make a profit from investing millions in ‘Rocketman’ – a film which celebrates my finding happiness from my marriage to David?? #hypocrisy” John wrote on Twitter Monday.
The popstar’s reaction came in the wake of Monday’s publication of a ruling by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) that ministers of the Church cannot give blessings to homosexual couples.
Blessings require both “the right intention of those who participate” and “that what is blessed be objectively and positively ordered to receive and express grace, according to the designs of God,” the CDF text declared, with the approval of Pope Francis.
“For this reason, it is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage” because the union itself is “not ordered to the Creator’s plan,” the document stated.
The text goes on to note that homosexual unions are not “in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”
God Himself never ceases to bless each of His pilgrim children in this world, it observed. “But he does not and cannot bless sin.”
For the above-mentioned reasons, “the Church does not have, and cannot have, the power to bless unions of persons of the same sex in the sense intended above,” the document concluded.
In his Monday tweet, Elton John included side-by-side news stories: one of the CDF ban on blessings and the other proclaiming “How the Vatican Spent Millions on Elton John’s Biopic.”
As Breitbart News reported in December, 2019, the Vatican sunk $1.1 million into the steamy Elton John film as one of a series of controversial investments including partnership in an eyewear firm, financing of a company making parts for nuclear power plants, and hundreds of millions in London property development.
The Rocketman film features a liaison between actor Taron Egerton, who plays Elton John, and Richard Madden, who appears as John Reid, his former manager, deemed by The Times “the most explicit gay love scene since Brokeback Mountain in 2005.”