ROME – The Vatican on Monday banned same-sex relationships, contradicting calls for practice by progressive bishops in Germany and elsewhere, and setting a limit to the conciliatory approach to gay people that characterizes Pope Francis’ pontificate has.
The Vatican’s teaching office, in a document personally approved by Pope Francis, said clergy could not express blessings over any sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and a woman.
The document confirms the Catholic doctrine of marriage and sexuality when several liberal bishops, including the head of the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference, appealed to same-sex couples in committed relationships. Priests in Germany have blessed such couples for many years, as have clergy in other parts of Northern Europe.
The blessings are wrong, the Vatican said Monday, because they seem to approve and encourage a choice and a way of life that can not be ordered objectively according to God’s revealed plans, adding that God’s and not can not. bless the sin. ”
German bishops have been caught up in other issues with the Vatican, including the question of giving Communion to the Lutherans, and are unlikely to back down in their stance on the blessing of gay unions. German bishops and lay Catholics are currently involved in a national synod that is considering changes to aspects of church life, including the possibility of female clergy and teaching about sexuality.
An agreement by German bishops to approve the blessings of same-sex unions would exacerbate tensions with more conservative sections of the church, including in Africa and the US conservative bishops in the US, were critical of what they did regarded as an excessively progressive drift away from traditional teachings, with the Archbishop of Denver warning in 2019 that the German bishops were moving toward a split.
Pope Francis took a more liberal approach to some questions about marriage and sexuality, including divorce and homosexuality. In one of the most famous statements of his pontificate, in 2013, he responded to a question about gay clergy: “Who am I to judge?” During his 2015 visit to the USA, he met privately with a gay couple in Washington, DC.
In comments published last year, the pope expressed support for same-sex civil unions, saying gay couples ‘have the right to be legally covered’, which he considered the archbishop of Buenos Aires.
But the pope also wrote that “there is absolutely no reason to view homosexual unions in any way similar to or even distant from God’s marriage and family plan.”
The Vatican document on Monday acknowledges that ‘the presence in such relationships of positive elements, which in themselves must be appreciated and appreciated’, but that such elements’ can not justify these relationships and are legitimate objects of ecclesiastical blessing can not make, since the positive elements within the context of a union are not ordered according to the Creator’s plan. ‘
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, an official textbook, states that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disturbed’, and that the tendency to perform them is ‘objectively disturbed’ and that it can not be approved under any circumstances. But the catechism also says that gay people “should be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unfair discrimination in their context should be avoided. ”
Monday’s reaffirmation of traditional teaching will likely disappoint progressive Catholics in hopes of further change and conservatives, as well as the pope’s decision in February last year not to make it easier to ordain married men to the priesthood.
“It’s not surprising to still be disappointed,” said Francis DeBernardo, executive director of the New Ways Ministry, who is campaigning for LGBT Catholics. “However, this decision is powerless because it will not stop the Catholic people in the pews, nor will many Catholic leaders who are eager to make such blessings happen.”
The demand for homosexuality has engendered other Christian denominations, fueling divisions with the worldwide Anglican community between liberal churches in Europe and North America and more conservative churches in Africa. Last year, the United Methodist Church agreed in principle to divorce due to disagreements over same-sex marriage and gay clergy, although a meeting to approve the move was delayed due to the pandemic.
Write to Francis X. Rocca by [email protected]
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