The Pope Endorses Same-Sex Marriage Blessings
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/27
The Roman Catholic Church, inarguably, has been one of the biggest denouncers of same-sex marriage and preventatives against equal rights for members of the LGBTI community.
CTV News reported that Catholic priests can now bless same-sex couples. This is in contradistinction to its former policy denying such a practice. While, at the same time, there are formal bans on gay marriage by them.
“But while the Vatican statement was heralded by some as a step toward breaking down discrimination in the Catholic Church, some LGBTQ+ advocates warned it underscored the church’s idea that gay couples remain inferior to heterosexual partnerships,” CTV News said.
Even with these blessings, Pope Francis’s letter emphasizes the standard definition in Catholic theology of marriage as between one man and one women. Furthermore, the blessings cannot be connected to a “Catholic celebration or religious service and should not be conferred at the same time as a civil union ceremony. Moreover, the blessings cannot use set rituals or even involve the clothing and gestures that belong in a wedding.”
That’s stark.
The letter stated, “For, those seeking a blessing should not be required to have prior moral perfection… There is no intention to legitimize anything, but rather to open one’s life to God, to ask for his help to live better, and also to invoke the Holy Spirit so that the values of the Gospel may be lived with greater faithfulness.”
How about simply accept homosexuals as legitimate full persons with the capability to be married under the sight of the, by definition, most loving entity ever? Either it doesn’t exist as defined, or it’s something preferred as a power move against a select few in the population.
Francis DeBernardo of New Ways Ministry supports LGBTQ+ Catholics. He said, “The significance of this news cannot be overstated… It is one thing to formally approve same-gender blessings, which he had already pastorally permitted, but to say that people should not be subjected to ‘an exhaustive moral analysis’ to receive God’s love and mercy is an even more significant step.”
The transition from homosexuality as intrinsically disordered to receiving blessings for same-sex couples is a change. However, one can focus on the pageantry of the symbolic inclusion without the formal institutional and theological inclusion. This may lighten the load on LGBTI couples from the larger Catholic public. However, this remains an open question.
CTV News has a good research department. They find the pertinent facts. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Vatican in 2021 said, “God cannot bless sin.” This is to say, we have the makings for many internal schisms in the Roman Catholic Church, even the a-evidentiary supreme logicians of the Catholic Church may catch them in reductio ad absurdums deserving of a schism or a massive singular reform on same-sex marriage.
I, and no doubt many others, find the prancing and dancing around equality more than tiresome. They continue a theocratic tradition from, probably, the Romans. Ironically, a few hereditary First Nations elders who I know called white settlers, “Romans.” That’s a good point. That project of Christian empiricization never ended, in some ways.
Pope Francis removed the official responsible for the 2021 statement. Dad spoke.
The idea behind the blessings is to increase one’s trust in God, apparently, as a “seed of the Holy Spirit.” The document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith emphasized, again as early as 2021, that individuals who are in irregular unions remain in a sin state.
Rev. James Martin, a supporter for the LGBTI Catholics, considered this a change by the current Pope a positive move with the inclusion of the blessing. Luigi Casalina of Messa had mostly the opposite view.
This is the internal schism dynamics potentially happening within the Roman Catholic Church.
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