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Notes -
Pope Francis has announced that priests are now allowed to bless same sex couples as long as it is not done in a way that implies that it's a ceremony or equivalent to a marriage. I haven't read the full document and the Vatican press release is confusing (like a lot of what this Pope does) but it seems to be trying to thread the needle of blessing gay couples but not their "union".
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2023-12/fiducia-supplicans-doctrine-faith-blessing-irregular-couples.html
Of course that distinction is subtle and the mainstream media mostly appears to be either misunderstanding it or intentionally misrepresenting it as allowing the blessing of the union itself. ABC went with the headline:
While he inserted a lot of caveats so that people will not interpret this as accepting gay couples and that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, my prediction is that lay people will just walk away with the headline that the Church has got with the times and is finally ok with gay marriage. A lot of the more liberal clergy will probably spread that view as well, even if they use language that could kind of technically be considered orthodox if you squint.
It reminds me of what CS Lewis wrote about how in each age we warn people the most about the errors they are least likely to commit. So in a time when most Catholics are already essentially apostates the Pope is doing his best to guard against zealotry and intolerance. It's hard for me to believe that this will lead to anything good for the Church. The future is clearly in the more conservative faction with large, churchgoing families. A move like this will discourage them but do nothing to bring in more liberals who will applaud from a distance but aren't going to start attending Mass.
The Catholic Church has always maintained:
The recently released document reiterates all those points. The ABC headline is simply false
However, the thing that the liberals in the church are excited about is the changing emphasis in terms of pastoral care:
So previously maybe two gay men walk into the church and ask the priest, "Can you bless our dedication of life-long love to each other?" The priest is wary and says, "Wait ... love 'amore' or love 'caritas'?" So the priest asks some questions, figures out they are asking him to bless a marriage-like relationship, a sexual relationship, and the priest would refuse it because such a blessing would be scandalous.
After this document, a liberal priest now has a winking approval from a Vatican that he is allowed to play ignorant and not "subject the couple to moral prerequisites" and avoid "being a judge who rejects." So instead of asking about the nature of their relationship or telling them to go and sin no more, he may give a blessing like, "may all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit."
So it is effectively "don't ask, don't tell" with respect to blessings? I hope it works out better than it did for the military.
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Yeah, I think the idea here is that "well if the two of them are in a committed relationship and not whoring around promiscuously, that's better than nothing, so don't break the bruised reed", something like Benedict's comments on using condoms, but it's not the ideal. And of course the liberals are going to run full-tilt with this on "yes bless your marriage yes sure it's fine to fuck around".
I can kinda see this for heterosexual relationships since they can always be made an honest woman/man eventually.
Someone who decided to get gay married is actively making a commitment to an institution that has never been accepted by the church. It's not just sin but defiance, defiance in service of a set of cultural memes (for one: that a person's "gay" identity trumps their religious identity, or the prescriptions it implies) that are hostile to a bunch of traditional religious views.
"Not ideal" seems like an understatement.
Not necessarily; the Catholic Church does not recognize marriages where either party has been divorced.
“Catholic Church”, “marriages”, and “divorced”, should be in scare quotes for that sentence to be even remotely accurate to ground-level reality.
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