
CV NEWS FEED // As Catholics across the world react in various ways to the Vatican’s recent document offering blessings to same-sex couples, apologists and staff from Catholic Answers provided their own thoughts on the controversial declaration.
Popular apologist Trent Horn argued that the main issue with the document, Fiducia Supplicans, is that it easily leads to confusion and scandal.
“It is technically true that a priest can bless ‘gay couples,’ but this is easily mistaken for a commendation of sin without the express qualification that the blessing is for each individual to grow closer to God,” he stated during a recent roundtable organized by Catholic Answers.
“Frankly, a better approach would be to allow for the blessing of same-sex couples via an official blessing in the Book of Blessings that is patterned after the blessings given to those suffering from drug abuse,” he continued. “The priest could say something like “For N., bound by the chains of disordered sexual attraction, that we encourage and assist him/her in his/her struggle, we pray. R.”
Karlo Broussard, another apologist at Catholic Answers, also said that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is causing confusion since the “expressed meaning of this blessing and the populace’s perceived meaning” of blessing same-sex couples are two very different things.
“The DDF is safe doctrinally but has failed (gravely?) in exercising pastoral prudence,” Broussard stated. “The damage has been done. Confusion is setting in. Let’s implore God that he will bring order out of disorder and peace out of chaos.”
President of Catholic Answers Christopher Check said that Fiducia Supplicans actually caused scandal in the Church, which he calls “a painful puzzle to faithful Catholics.”
“At the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, there are surely one or two moral theologians who understand [the] components of a moral act, set down in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. They must certainly be familiar with the fundamentals of Christian morality,” he stated. “Yet, within hours of the Dicastery’s publication of Fiducia Supplicans, media all over the globe reported that the Catholic Church had reversed its teaching of 2021 that homosexual couples and “irregular” heterosexual couples cannot be blessed.”
He continued:
Who saw this coming? If no one at the Dicastery did, then we have a grave staffing problem in the very office charged with the safeguarding of faith and morals and preventing scandal. If someone at the Vatican did know, and kept silent, then we have a lack of what we called in the Marine Corps “moral courage.” If the reaction was anticipated and the document released all the same, then we have an act that is, at the very least, morally problematic, and probably much worse.
Apologist Joe Heschmeyer wrote that while it’s not surprising that Fiducia Supplicans created confusion, faithful Catholics have an obligation “to interpret the document charitably and to be charitable to those who (not without reason) are scandalized or confused by it.”
“Blessing and sin are not strictly incompatible,” he stated. “How do we begin in the confessional? ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’ And if we find ourselves at Mass in a state of mortal sin and can’t receive Communion, what do many of us do? Go up to receive a blessing. So it’s not revolutionary to say, as the Church did in 2021, that God can bless people struggling with same-sex attraction (or even living such a lifestyle) but can’t and won’t bless sinful unions.
“I think the most charitable way both to interpret and implement the declaration is to remember that ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’ (Rom. 5:8),” he continued. “So we need to avoid two errors: first, imagining that we need to be holy before we can come before Jesus, and second, thinking that Jesus wants us to stay as the sinners he found us.”
