ROME — Pope Francis has added to the confusion regarding the blessing of same-sex couples, now insisting that only the individuals may be blessed and not the couple.
In a conversation with CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell that aired on 60 Minutes on Sunday, the pontiff seemed to reverse a Vatican text from last December that explicitly allowed for the blessing of same-sex couples.
“Last year you decided to allow Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples,” O’Donnell said to the pope. “That’s a big change. Why?”
“No, what I allowed was not to bless the union,” Francis replied. “That cannot be done because that is not the sacrament. I cannot. The Lord made it that way.”
“But to bless each person, yes. The blessing is for everyone. For everyone. To bless a homosexual-type union, however, goes against the given right, against the law of the Church. But to bless each person, why not? The blessing is for all.”
“Some people were scandalized by this. But why? Everyone! Everyone!” he reiterated.
In point of fact, however, the Vatican Declaration Fiducia Supplicans, “On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings,” spoke explicitly of the blessing of same-sex couples.
Under a broader, pastoral understanding of blessings, “one can understand the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage,” wrote Cardinal Víctor “Tucho” Fernández, prefect of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, in his presentation of the Declaration (emphasis added).
In the text, the publication of which was expressly authorized by Pope Francis, Cardinal Fernández declared that allowing the blessing of objectively sinful relationships avoids “the danger that a pastoral gesture that is so beloved and widespread will be subjected to too many moral prerequisites,” which “could overshadow the unconditional power of God’s love that forms the basis for the gesture of blessing.”
“Such blessings are meant for everyone; no one is to be excluded from them,” the text states.
This office “has considered several questions of both a formal and an informal nature about the possibility of blessing same-sex couples and — in light of Pope Francis’s fatherly and pastoral approach — of offering new clarifications,” the document reads (emphasis added).
In the third chapter of the text, titled “Blessings of Couples in Irregular Situations and of Couples of the Same Sex,” Fernández wrote that within the horizon outlined, there appears “the possibility of blessings for couples in irregular situations and for couples of the same sex, the form of which should not be fixed ritually by ecclesial authorities to avoid producing confusion with the blessing proper to the Sacrament of Marriage.”
In its 2021 text forbidding the blessing of same-sex unions, which has been superseded by Fiducia Supplicans, the Vatican office had already allowed for a blessing to be given to “individual persons with homosexual inclinations,” and the novelty of Fiducia Supplicans was to extend the blessing to the couple, not just the individuals.
In an interview last December, the former head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, noted that the Church had always allowed a priest to bless someone who lives in sin, but the new document allowed for blessing “a reality that is contrary to God’s law, such as an extramarital relationship.”
“Notice that not only sinful persons are blessed here, but that by blessing the couple, it is the sinful relationship itself that is blessed,” he said.
Now it would appear that Pope Francis has rethought his position and has reverted to the blessing only of individual gay persons, without blessing a same-sex couple.
And although Francis said in his 60 Minutes interview that he was surprised that some people were “scandalized” by the blessing of individuals in sinful relationships, this position seems disingenuous.
The Church has always permitted the blessing of sinners; what shocked people was the Vatican’s extension of blessings to the same-sex couple itself, which gave the idea that God would bless a sinful relationship.
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