Seeing the Vatican’s recent declaration [1] on blessings for (among others) same-sex couples, I remembered a story Pope Francis told back in May. He was sharing a stage with Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni at a conference to highlight Italy’s birthrate crisis. He recalled that at the Ash Wednesday general audience a few weeks earlier, he had been approached by a middle-aged woman. “I greet the lady, and she opens a bag, and says, ‘Will you bless my child!’ It was a little dog!” The Pope flipped.
“I lacked patience, and I scolded the lady. ‘Madam, so many children are hungry, and you with this little dog!’” he told her. The lady went away without a blessing.
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith’s December 18 “Declaration on the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings,” Fiducia supplicans, says that blessings “remind us that, even in the use of created things, human beings are invited to seek God, to love him, and to serve Him faithfully.” All sorts of people and creatures and things can be blessed. And in coming up for a blessing, people “show by this request their sincere openness to transcendence, the confidence of their hearts that they do not trust in their own strength alone, their need for God.”
So, what went wrong with the dog mom? Francis didn’t have a problem with blessing a dog. He has blessed many dogs in his time as pope, and all kinds of animals, domestic and agricultural, as an archbishop. What he objected to was treating the dog as if it were a baby: carried in a bag, spoiled rotten, probably in a woolen outfit. To have blessed that “baby” would have been, in his mind, a travesty. The dog was not being respected as a dog, but what really seemed to bother Francis was that it was being pampered like a child while real children went hungry.
Remember Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa waking [2] his Italian priest to “throw down a blessing” on him? He’s late for his big fight, but he needs the blessing because he and his girlfriend have a baby on the way, and so if he does get beaten up badly “it won’t be so bad.” Fr. Carmine doesn’t challenge either Rocky’s fighting or his fornication, but blesses him though an open window before going back to bed. Context, as every good pastor knows, is everything.
And that is what Fiducia supplicans is all about: distinguishing between different kinds of benediction, reminding us that blessings are not just liturgical, and underscoring that they need not imply approval or endorsement. The distinction has carried into popular parlance. Blessing can mean “endorse” or “approve”—“the boss has given his blessing to the idea of a Christmas party”—but is also a way of spontaneously transmitting gratitude, encouragement, and consolation: “bless you for being there for me”; “bless your work with migrants,” and so on.
In the Church, liturgical blessings are always of the endorsing-approving kind. There are authorized texts and rituals, above all the so-called Book of Blessings, which cover a huge range of prayers for people and circumstances. According to Fiducia supplicans, such blessings require that “what is blessed be conformed to God’s will, as expressed in the teachings of the Church.” That means, at least, that ministers should avoid blessing what contradicts the law or the spirit of the Gospel.
For these reasons, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s March 2021 “Responsum ad dubium [3]” declared that, because only sexual relations lived out in marriage are morally licit, and same-sex relations take place “within the context of a union not ordered to the Creator’s plan,” the Church does not have the power to liturgically bless “a union that presumes to be a marriage or to an extra-marital sexual practice,” even if the relationship includes positive elements (fidelity, for example). God, said the CDF, “does not and cannot bless sin.”
Although he assented to the publication of that Responsum, Pope Francis was unhappy about it. He made known both privately and publicly at the time that it did not reflect his thinking, and was inadequate. There were also questions about how it came about, and who was consulted. It was pushed through by the CDF’s then-secretary, Archbishop Giacomo Morandi. In January 2022, Francis made Morandi a bishop in the far north of Italy and the following month revamped [4] the CDF’s internal procedures.
Then came the appointment last July of the pope’s longtime theological collaborator, Cardinal Victor Manuel (“Tucho”) Fernández, as head of the reformed CDF, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF). When some conservative cardinals challenged Pope Francis on the eve of the synod assembly in Rome in October to answer a question about same-sex blessings, the pope and Fernández took the opportunity to make up for the defects of the Responsum.
Those responses of September 25, known as the Respuestas because they were in Spanish, did not contradict the Responsum. Francis made clear that the Church must avoid any rite or sacrament that contradicted its teaching on marriage, or that involved blessing as marriage something that was not marriage. But the Respuestas did not stop there, adding three key points.
First was the importance of “pastoral charity,” which required much more than the defense of objective truth. It wasn’t enough to be judges who condemned and excluded; patience, understanding, and encouragement were also needed.
Second, “pastoral prudence” might allow for forms of blessing to be given to people whose relationships did not conform to the Church’s teachings about sex and marriage, as long as these blessings didn’t communicate an erroneous understanding of marriage, for behind the request for a blessing can be a trusting call for God’s help.
Third, faced with situations that, objectively speaking, are morally unacceptable, pastoral charity also calls for pastors to keep in mind circumstances that might be influencing or constraining people’s moral choices.
These points are what should (and do) guide pastors such as Rocky’s Fr. Carmine, who offers an informal, non-liturgical, non-ritual kind of blessing in response to Rocky’s reaching out to him for help and encouragement, notwithstanding his weaknesses and mistakes. A blessing in such circumstances, says Fiducia supplicans, allows people to know that “their heavenly Father continues to will their good and to hope that they will ultimately open themselves to the good.”
The purpose of Fiducia supplicans is to develop “a broader understanding of blessings” in line with the points the pope made in the Respuestas, setting out the relevant pastoral and doctrinal issues. It stretches back through Scripture and Tradition to show that blessings both descend (“May the Lord bless you and keep you”) and ascend (“Bless the Lord, my soul”). But they are also horizontal, when we bless each other in response to God’s blessings on us, as when people wish each other God’s blessing before saying goodbye, or at a wedding. In the New Testament, Jesus blesses children, his disciples and others, “as a gesture of grace, protection and goodness.” So, too, says Fiducia supplicans, God gives his Church the power to bless, to include, to make peace, to express comfort and care and encouragement. “The blessing expresses God’s merciful embrace and the Church’s motherhood, which invites the faithful to have the same feelings as God toward their brothers and sisters.”
Cardinal Fernández makes clear that (unlike the 2021 Responsum) Fiducia supplicans is the result of a broad and careful consultation involving the DDF’s full standing body, the congresso, and the pope himself. Because the document is based on Francis’s pastoral vision and represents a “real development from what has been said about blessings in the Magisterium and the official texts of the Church,” it has the status of a “Declaration.” This is about as high a level of teaching authority as a Vatican document not written by the pope himself can have. (The last was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s Dominum iesus, twenty-three years ago.) It reflects theologically what has long been known and done on the ground. But it represents a development in Church teaching, because the magisterium often lags behind lived faith.
The message of Fiducia supplicans is that it isn’t enough to say that God does not bless sin. What about the people involved, the same-sex couple themselves? Is grace denied them, when they seek God’s help? When people ask for a blessing, “an exhaustive moral analysis should not be placed as a precondition for conferring it”; nor should those seeking a blessing be required to have “prior moral perfection.” When Rocky turns up fearful that his upcoming fight will leave him too messed up to care for his girlfriend and his baby, Fr. Carmine does not tell him to come back only after he has made an honest woman of her. He senses Rocky’s hunger for help, his need of reassurance, and he gives him these because the Church has given him the power to communicate God’s merciful love. And, as Fiducia supplicans puts it, “God never turns away anyone who approaches him.”
What kind of blessings, then, are possible for couples in “irregular circumstances”? Rocky and his girlfriend can get married sacramentally. But that is not an option for the divorced and remarried who cannot get an annulment, nor for the same-sex couple. To imply, via a liturgical blessing, that they can have something that looks and feels like marriage is expressly excluded by Fiducia supplicans. The declaration could not be clearer on this point: the informal blessings it approves “should not be fixed ritually by ecclesial authorities, to avoid producing confusion with the blessing proper to the Sacrament of Marriage.” This would appear, prima facie, to reject the kinds of prayers [5] approved, for example, by the Flemish bishops in Belgium in September 2022. Their own view, I understand from sources close to the episcopate, is that these prayers are not a “ritual” or even a blessing per se, but a prayer for God to accompany a same-sex couple, and therefore comfortably within the limits set by Fiducia supplicans. But the fact that the Flemish bishops approved a form of words in which the couple make pledges to each other sails dangerously close to what this new Declaration warns against.
In Germany, meanwhile, the so called synodaler weg, or Synodal Path, which is not recognized by Rome, voted in March this year to approve liturgical guidelines for same-sex blessings to be developed over the next few years—precisely what the new Vatican guidelines preclude. In Fiducia supplicans, blessings for couples in irregular situations are for those who “do not claim a legitimation of their own status, but who beg that all that is true, good and humanly valid in their lives and in their relationships be enriched, healed and elevated by the Holy Spirit.” The blessing, in other words, is in response to desire for grace, not a way to legitimize their union. (Think of the dog mom: it is one thing to bless a dog, another to go along with the pretense it’s a baby.) It is essential, says Fiducia supplicans, to grasp the pope’s concern that “these non-ritualized blessings never cease being simple gestures that provide an effective means of increasing trust in God on the part of the people who ask for them,” ensuring they do not become “a liturgical or semi-liturgical act, similar to a sacrament.”
The news coverage of Fiducia supplicans has focused, understandably, on the blessings of same-sex couples. Few have noticed that it also allows blessings to be given to Catholics who are divorced and remarried without an annulment. This, too, is a significant development, offering something of a coda to the famous eighth chapter of Amoris laetitia, which calls for pastoral accompaniment to couples seeking re-admission to the sacraments, attentive to their personal circumstances and stories.
That chapter ends with the pope urging such couples to speak to their pastors in order to discover a path to personal growth, and urging pastors to listen to them “with a sincere desire to understand their plight and their point of view, in order to help them live better lives and to recognize their place in the Church.” Now pastors can do more—if they aren’t already doing it. With hands extended and with prayers, they can show such couples that “in the Church they are always pilgrims, always beggars, always loved—and, despite everything, always blessed.”
Austen Ivereigh is a British biographer of Pope Francis, and a Fellow in contemporary Church history at Campion Hall, Oxford.
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