One year later, Vatican document on same-sex blessings not causing much of a stir

 

National Catholic Register, Dec 18, 2024 / 11:00 am (CNA).

Around this time last year, a Vatican document authorizing priests to provide non-liturgical blessings for same-sex couples led to headlines around the world in the secular and Catholic presses. Some bishops from Africa rejected the pronouncement, some in Europe celebrated it, and bishops in various places issued guidelines explaining it.

One year later, what has been the document’s effect on the Catholic Church in the United States? How common, or uncommon, are blessings of people in same-sex relationships in parishes?

To try to find out, the National Catholic Register, CNA’s news partner, earlier this month contacted all 177 Latin Rite dioceses in the United States asking for their experiences with implementing the document, Fiducia Supplicans, which allowed what the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith called “the possibility of blessings for couples … of the same sex,” providing the blessings be short, follow no liturgy to avoid looking like a wedding, and “not claim to sanction or legitimize anything.”

Twenty-one dioceses responded. Some of those declined to comment. All who provided information said they don’t track blessings offered by priests; virtually none reported receiving either complaints or comments from priests or other people regarding practices stemming from the document.

A year ago, supporters saw the document (which was followed by a clarifying statement two and a half weeks later) either as a useful pastoral approach to people in what the Church considers objectively sinful situations, or a step toward full endorsement of same-sex sexual relationships, which they welcomed. Some critics said it undermined Church teachings on marriage and sexuality; others opponents said that it didn’t go far enough.

Spokane silence

Father Darrin Connall told the Register that as vicar general of the Diocese of Spokane, Washington, he speaks with many priests regularly and that not one has told him about a same-sex couple asking for a blessing.

“I’m unaware of one case where that’s happened,” Connall said by telephone. “I haven’t heard a priest talk about it since last December, last January.”

Bishop David O’Connell of the Diocese of Trenton, New Jersey, said he isn’t aware of any blessings of same-sex couples by priests in his diocese.

“I don’t have any sense that it happened at all. It may have. But if it’s been done, it has been done clandestinely, and done without my knowledge,” O’Connell said.

“I’m certainly aware of what the document says. I’m aware of the boundaries, and I have no problem discussing them, but it just doesn’t come up,” he said, adding that he hasn’t been asked personally to do such blessings.

In the Diocese of Buffalo, New York, discussion about the document quickly died down after its release, said Father Peter Karalus, vicar general of the diocese.

“There was initial discussion at the Presbyteral Council and other consultative bodies when the document was first issued but there have not been any follow-up discussions or requests for discussion,” Karalus told the Register by email through a spokesman for the diocese.

That mirrors the experiences of almost all other dioceses that provided comment to the Register.

Highest percentage of same-sex couples

An exception is the Archdiocese of San Francisco. The city of San Francisco has the highest percentage of same-sex couples among large cities in the United States.

“We have had some issues over the past year with people trying to insist they be blessed in an illegitimate manner,” said Peter Marlow, a representative of Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, by email.

Marlow shared with the Register excerpts from a memo Archbishop Cordileone sent priests of the archdiocese a few days after the Vatican document was released.

In it, the archbishop said that such blessings must be “spontaneous” and not “pre-planned, pre-scheduled, or ritualistically celebrated.”

He noted in the memo to priests that priests and bishops “are frequently asked by people to give them a blessing.”

“I’m sure you, as I, never ask information about their moral lives or how they are living out their intimate relationships. We simply bless them,” Cordileone wrote. “Consequently, in the case of two people who present themselves as a couple in a marriage or marriage-like relationship, but it is evident that they are not in the bond of a valid marriage, it is always licit to bless them as two separate individuals.”

But such blessings shouldn’t be given, he said, “if it would be a cause of scandal, that is, if it would mislead either the persons themselves or others into believing that there may be contexts other than marriage in which ‘sexual relations find their natural, proper, and fully human meaning.’”

The last phrase in quotation marks is taken from Fiducia Supplicans (4).

“As a consequence, any priest has the right to deny such blessings if, in his judgment, doing so would be a source of scandal in any way,” Cordileone wrote.

Judgment calls

Father Connall, of the Diocese of Spokane, told the Register that priests make judgment calls about blessings and many other things all the time.

“There are all kinds of pastoral decisions that we make on any one day that the bishop respects,” Connall said.

Fiducia Supplicans shifted the approach of a previous Vatican policy as stated in a document released in February 2021, which said that the Church can offer blessings “to individual persons with homosexual inclinations” but not to unions of same-sex couples, because God “does not and cannot bless sin.”

Vatican officials have said the December 2023 document does not alter Church teaching that sexual activity is moral only if engaged in by a man and woman married to each other who are open to the possibility of procreating new life.

“The real novelty of this Declaration,” wrote Cardinal Víctor Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, in a January 2024 clarifying statement, “… is not the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations.”

Instead, he said, “it is the invitation to distinguish between two different forms of blessings” — what he called “liturgical or ritualized” on the one hand and “spontaneous or pastoral” on the other.

That distinction is clear to priests in the Diocese of Buffalo, said Father Karalus, the vicar general there.

He said, “Priests understand that it is not a blessing of a couple or a relationship, but a blessing upon the individuals.”

This article was originally published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s news partner, on Dec. 17, 2024, and has been adapted for CNA.