ROME — The Vatican’s flip-flop on blessings for gay couples has set ecumenical dialogue with Coptic Christians back 20 years, Zenit News Service reported this week.
The Coptic Orthodox Church, Egypt’s main Christian community, has suspended ecumenical dialogue with the Catholic Church following the Vatican’s release of Fiducia Supplicans, a document permitting blessings of homosexual couples for the first time.
After 20 years of open dialogue with the Catholic Church, the Holy Synod of the Coptic Orthodox Church has decided to break off further conversations in order to “reevaluate the results achieved by the dialogue from its beginning twenty years ago, and establish new standards and mechanisms for the dialogue to proceed in the future.”
The decision was made after “consulting with the sister churches of the Eastern Orthodox family,” the text states.
Reaffirming traditional Christian moral teaching, the Coptic Orthodox Church reiterated “its firm position of rejecting all forms of homosexual relationships, because they violate the Holy Bible and the law by which God created man as male and female.”
The Church “considers any blessing of such relations, whatever its type, to be a blessing for sin, and this is unacceptable,” it said, echoing an earlier Vatican document that prohibited such blessings on the grounds that God “cannot and does not bless sin.”
“The Church believes that the Holy Bible, is the good word of truth for all ages, and the Bible in both Testaments condemns, warns, and forbids sexual practices between two people of the same sex,” the Synod stated.
“As for those who choose to reconcile with their homosexual tendencies, letting go of themselves to homosexual acts, rejecting spiritual and psychological treatment, and choosing of their own free will to break God’s commandment, their condition becomes worse than the one who lives in [struggle against] adultery/fornication.”
“Therefore, they must be warned and cut off from communion until they repent,” it added.
The Coptic Orthodox Church “categorically rejects invoking the idea of different cultures to justify same-sex relations within what is called ‘absolute human freedom,’ which causes the destruction of humanity,” it said.