(CP) The Coptic Orthodox Church has reportedly suspended its dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church over the Catholic Church’s decision to permit priests to bless same-sex couples.
Coptic leadership held a Holy Synod last week in Wadi El-Natrun, Egypt. The church hierarchy really useful various issues, including recognizing assorted monasteries, adding mental health topics to marital counseling and praying for unity inside the Orthodox Church.
Coptic Orthodox spokesman Father Moussa Ibrahim explained in a video that “probably the most notable” motion from the annual Holy Synod was “to suspend theological dialogue with the Catholic Church after its change of position on the difficulty of homosexuality.”
In a statement released last week, the Coptic Church elaborated on its stance, stating that it “affirms its firm position of rejecting all types of homosexual relationships, because they violate the Holy Bible and the law by which God created man as female and male, and the Church considers any blessing of such relations, whatever its type, to be a blessing for sin, and that is unacceptable.”
“After consulting with the sister churches of the Eastern Orthodox family, it was decided to suspend the theological dialogue with the Catholic Church, reevaluate the outcomes achieved by the dialogue from its starting twenty years ago, and establish latest standards and mechanisms for the dialogue to proceed in the long run,” read the statement.
“Whoever suffers from homosexual tendencies and controls themselves from sexual behaviors, the control is credited to them as a struggle. These who’re struggling are left with the warfares of thought, sight, and attractions, identical to heterosexuals. As for somebody who falls into homosexual behaviors, they’re just like the heterosexuals who fall into the sin of adultery/fornication, needing true repentance.”
Last December, Pope Francis approved a “Fiducia Supplicans” declaration, which provided “a broadening and enrichment of the classical understanding of blessings, which is closely linked to a liturgical perspective.”
“It is precisely on this context that one can understand the potential 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,” stated the declaration.
The Vatican document said that “when people ask for a blessing, an exhaustive moral evaluation mustn’t be placed as a precondition for conferring it” and that “those in search of a blessing mustn’t be required to have prior moral perfection.”
Although the declaration reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s belief that homosexuality is sinful and that same-sex unions weren’t to be condoned, critics of the document contend it contradicts Catholic teaching on marriage and sexuality.
In February, nearly 100 Catholic clergy and students signed an open letter demanding that Pope Francis withdraw the declaration, arguing that it “attempts to introduce a separation between doctrine and liturgy on the one hand, and pastoral practice on the opposite.”
“But that is unimaginable: in truth, pastoral care, like all motion, at all times presupposes a theory and, due to this fact, if pastoral care performs something that doesn’t correspond to the doctrine, what is definitely being proposed is a special doctrine,” continued the letter.
“The fact is that a priest is imparting a blessing on two individuals who present themselves as a pair, within the sexual sense, and precisely a pair defined by its objectively sinful relationship. Therefore — whatever the intentions and interpretations of the document, or the reasons the priest may try to offer — this motion can be the visible and tangible sign of a special doctrine, which contradicts traditional doctrine.”
Catholics for Choice President Jamie L. Manson released a statement last yr calling the Vatican declaration “stunning and historic.” She claimed it “can be transformative for advancing LGBTQIA+ visibility and inclusion.”
“There continues to be an extended strategy to go before the church fully affirms the inherent, God-given dignity and equality of LGBTQIA+ Catholics, our marriages, and our families,” stated Manson.
“Today’s declaration reveals that this will not be a Pope Francis problem, but a middle-management problem — one attributable to many years of hardened institutional stigma and outspoken anti-LGBTQIA+ advocacy from a hierarchy increasingly mired in culture wars, in defiance of a pope who’s moving the church in an opposite, more inclusive direction.”
