A Belgian bishop has spoken to the Vatican over his order that the Catholic Church should not bless same-sex unions
BRUSSELS – A Belgian bishop has spoken to the Vatican about his order that the Catholic Church will not bless same-sex unions, because God “cannot bless sin”.
The bishop of Antwerp, Johan Bonny, wrote in an opinion piece on Wednesday that he felt ‘shame for my church’ and ‘intellectual and moral misunderstanding’ after Pope Francis ‘negative’ response to a question about whether Catholic clergy have the authority to same sex to bless, approve. unions. The official answer said that God “can not and cannot bless sin.”
Bonny, who was part of a Vatican 2015 synod on marriage and family, said: “I want to apologize to everyone for whom it is painful and incomprehensible.”
The conference of Belgian bishops supported Bonny’s concerns, saying that LGBT faithful and their families regarded the Vatican decision as ‘extremely painful’. The conference encouraged everyone to work towards a climate of respect, recognition and integration. ‘
The Vatican’s position pleased conservatives, discouraged advocates for LGBT Catholics and threw a wrench into a debate in the German Catholic Church, which was at the forefront of opening discussions on hot-button issues such as Catholic doctrines on homosexuality .
Bonny said he was disappointed at the level of arguments leveled at the letter from the Vatican’s orthodoxy office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
“Intellectually, it does not even reach the high school level. This kind of argument, the logic, you see right through it. “These days you don’t convince anyone like that,” Bonny said.
The record of the Congregation distinguished between blessing unions of the same sex and the welcoming and blessing of gay people endorsing the church. It argued that such unions were not part of God’s plan and that any sacramental recognition thereof could be confused with marriage.
The Vatican believes that gay people should be treated with dignity and respect, but that gay sex is ‘intrinsically disturbed’. According to Catholic teaching, marriage is a lifelong bond between man and woman that is part of God’s plan and intended to create new life.
The document from the orthodoxy office claims that same-sex unions cannot be blessed by the Catholic Church because they are not part of the plan.
God “does not sin and he cannot sin: He blesses the sinful man, so that he may realize that he is part of his plan of love and let him be changed by him,” reads the note.
In his opinion piece published in the Belgian newspaper De Standaard, Bonny opposed that ‘sin is one of the most difficult theological and moral categories to define, and one of the last to determine people and their way of living together’.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a similar decision in 2003 stating that the church’s respect for gay people “can in no way lead to the approval of homosexual behavior or to the legal recognition of homosexual unions.”
Belgium has historically been a solid Roman Catholic country with strong ties to the Vatican. But the number of believers and the attendance of church services has shrunk in recent decades.
The nation is littered with large and small churches, but their obituaries are almost always more than those for baptism.