ROME — Over 200 German-speaking Catholic theologians issued a statement Sunday rejecting the Vatican’s recent declaration prohibiting the blessing of same-sex unions.
The Vatican text “is characterized by a paternalistic gesture of superiority and discriminates against homosexual people and their lifestyle,” state the 212 theologians, who hail from universities around Germany and Austria.
The theologians accuse the Vatican text of lacking “theological depth, interpretive understanding, and argumentative rigor.” By ignoring relevant “scientific findings,” they declare, “the Magisterium undermines its own authority.”
As Breitbart News reported, on March 15 the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued a declaration that the Church has no power to bless homosexual unions, noting that God Himself “does not and cannot bless sin.”
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 inscribed in creation,” stated the CDF text, issued with the express approval of Pope Francis.
“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,” it noted.
“For this reason, it is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage,” it said, “as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex” because such unions are “not ordered to the Creator’s plan.”
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,” it stated, citing Pope Francis.
Blessing an illicit sexual union would be “to approve and encourage a choice and a way of life that cannot be recognized as objectively ordered to the revealed plans of God,” it noted.
In their response to the text, the German-speaking theologians reject the underlying teaching it contains, insisting that “the lives and loves of same-sex couples before God are worth no less than the lives and loves of any other couple.”
The Catholic Church, along with many other Christian churches, has consistently taught that homosexual relations are immoral.
“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” states the Catechism of the Catholic Church, adding that such acts are “contrary to the natural law” and “close the sexual act to the gift of life.”
The homosexual inclination is “objectively disordered,” the Catechism continues, but those who experience same-sex attraction “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity” and every “sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”