Pope Francis has suggested there might be ways to bless same-sex unions, responding to 5 conservative cardinals who challenged him to affirm church teaching on homosexuality ahead of an enormous meeting where LGBTQ+ Catholics are on the agenda.
The Vatican on Monday published a letter Francis wrote to the cardinals on July 11 after receiving an inventory of 5 questions, or “dubia,” from them a day earlier. In it, Francis suggests that such blessings might be studied in the event that they didn’t confuse the blessing with sacramental marriage.
New Ways Ministry, which advocates for LGBTQ+ Catholics, said the letter “significantly advances” efforts to make LGBTQ+ Catholics welcomed within the church and “one big straw towards breaking the camel’s back” of their marginalization.
The Vatican holds that marriage is an indissoluble union between man and woman. As a result, it has long opposed gay marriage. But even Francis has voiced support for civil laws extending legal advantages to same-sex spouses, and Catholic priests in parts of Europe have been blessing same-sex unions without Vatican censure.
Francis’ response to the cardinals, nonetheless, marks a reversal from the Vatican’s current official position. In an explanatory note in 2021, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said flat-out that the church couldn’t bless gay unions because “God cannot bless sin.”
In his recent letter, Francis reiterated that matrimony is a union between a person and a girl. But responding to the cardinals’ query about homosexual unions and blessings, he said “pastoral charity” requires patience and understanding and that regardless, priests cannot grow to be judges “who only deny, reject and exclude.”
“For this reason, pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are types of benediction, requested by a number of individuals, that don’t transmit a mistaken conception of marriage,” he wrote. “Because when a benediction is requested, it’s expressing a request for help from God, a plea to give you the chance to live higher, a trust in a father who may also help us to live higher.”
He noted that there are situations which might be objectively “not morally acceptable.” But he said the identical “pastoral charity” requires that individuals be treated as sinners who won’t be fully at fault for his or her situations.
Francis added that there isn’t a need for dioceses or bishops conferences to show such pastoral charity into fixed norms or protocols, saying the problem might be handled on a case-by-case basis “since the lifetime of the church runs on channels beyond norms.”
Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, welcomed the pope’s openness.
“The allowance for pastoral ministers to bless same-gender couples implies that the church does indeed recognize that holy love can exist between same-gender couples, and the love of those couples mirrors the love of God,” he said in an announcement. “Those recognitions, while not completely what LGBTQ+ Catholics would want, are an infinite advance towards fuller and more comprehensive equality.”
The five cardinals, all conservative prelates from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, had challenged Francis to affirm church teaching on gays, women’s ordination, the authority of the pope and other issues of their letter.
They published the fabric two days before the beginning of a serious three-week synod, or meeting, on the Vatican at which LGBTQ+ Catholics and their place within the church are on the agenda.
The signatories were a few of Francis’ most vocal critics, all of them retired and of the more doctrinaire generation of cardinals appointed by St. John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI.
They were Cardinals Walter Brandmueller of Germany, a former Vatican historian; Raymond Burke of the United States, whom Francis axed as head of the Vatican supreme court; Juan Sandoval of Mexico, the retired archbishop of Guadalajara; Robert Sarah of Guinea, the retired head of the Vatican’s liturgy office; and Joseph Zen, the retired archbishop of Hong Kong.
Brandmueller and Burke were amongst 4 signatories of a previous round of “dubia” to Francis in 2016 following his controversial opening to letting divorced and civilly remarried couples receive Communion. Then, the cardinals were concerned that Francis’ position violated church teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. Francis never responded to their questions, and two of their co-signatories subsequently died.
Francis did respond this time around. The cardinals didn’t publish his reply, but they apparently found it so unsatisfactory that they reformulated their five questions, submitted them to him again and asked him to easily respond with a yes or no. When he didn’t, the cardinals decided to make the texts public and issue a “notification” warning to the faithful.
The Vatican’s doctrine office published his reply to them a number of hours later, though it did so without his introduction during which he urged the cardinals to not be afraid of the synod.
