Catholics across the world are divided over Pope Francis’s recent declaration that priests can bless homosexual couples, with supporters of it saying it is an overdue step in the right direction while those opposed see it as a mortal sign and a sign that gender ideology is replacing the sacred tenets of the church.
In a statement on Wednesday, Chris Vella, co-chair of the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics, called the declaration known as the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF)—“a milestone in the long journey towards equality.”
“As a Catholic LGBTIQ+ person married to my partner for the past five years, the decision by the DDF is a major milestone that confirms what we always knew in our hearts: that our relationships can be blessed, are indeed holy, and can be a blessing for our families and communities as well as the Church,” said Mr. Vella.
“This announcement comes on the eve of the first date with my husband-to-be ten years ago. What a wonderful gift!”
In heralding the pope’s same-sex blessing declaration, Francis DeBernardo, Executive Director of New Ways Ministry, which advocates for the inclusion of the LGBT community in the Catholic church, said that “Pope Francis gave LGBTQ+ Catholics an early Christmas gift this year by approving blessings for same-gender couples.”
He added, “The Vatican doctrinal office’s previous claim that ‘God does not bless sin’ has been uprooted by the new exhortation, ‘God never turns away anyone who approaches him!’”
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In Massachusetts, the fourth most Catholic state in the United States, Cardinal Sean O'Malley, the Archbishop of Boston, also hailed the doctrine.
“We thank the Holy Father for his love and care of all the people in the flock,” he said in a statement to The Boston Globe.
The Boston Globe won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for breaking the Catholic priest sex scandal in the early 2000s and is known for being critical of the church in opinion pieces.
For others like C.J. Doyle, Executive Director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, the dicastery is a sign that the church is deteriorating under the pope’s command and that a woke ideology is being forced upon not just parishioners but priests.
“No Catholic priest should be forced, against his conscience, to bless mortal sin. No Catholic priest should be coerced into acts which are in opposition to the Bible, the Catechism and two thousand years of Catholic teachings,” he said in a post on his group’s website.
He called Cardinal O'Malley’s statement “scandalous.”
Mr. Doyle pointed to the pope’s recent actions against two bishops, a cardinal, and an order of Franciscan friars for dissenting against his growing support for the LGBT community,
“Given the removal of Bishops Joseph Strickland and Daniel Torres, the punitive measures against Cardinal Raymond Burke, and the sanctions imposed upon the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, it is only reasonable to ask if Fiducia Supplicans will be one more pretext to purge the Church of Papa Bergoglio’s ideological adversaries.”
Mr. Doyle was making reference to the pope’s birth name, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, and the dicastery’s Latin name, “fiducia supplicans,” which translates to “supplicating trust.”
A Catholic Church in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Dec. 4, 2021. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times
‘New Sexual Revolution’
In New Jersey, which has the largest Catholic population in the United States, Gregory Quinlan, President of The Center For Garden State Families and Pro-Family Network, offers a perspective as both a Christian and former homosexual, on the pope’s decision to reverse the church’s one-time staunch position against gay marriage.“The question is—what is Francis and his group trying to do with the Catholic church,” he asked. “To me, it looks like he’s trying to tear it down and build it up in his image.”
Mr. Quinlan, who left behind his homosexual lifestyle in 1992, told The Epoch Times that while his “gadar” doesn’t suggest the pope is a homosexual himself, he thinks it is suspect that his “so excessively pro-LGBTQ.”
“He certainly has an extra affection for LGBTQ ideology,” said Mr. Quinlan.
Speaking from experience, Mr. Quinlan sees homosexuality as a mental health or conditioned disorder born out of a sexualized era. For him, it was the 1960s sexual revolution when erotica was being promoted as a normal lifestyle.
The pope, he says, is promoting a new sexual revolution, “a more dangerous one,” added Mr. Quinlan, because it is aligning with an openly disturbing push to normalize pedophilia and gender mutilation.
He called Pope Francis “wicked” and likened him to “Don Corleone”—a main character in the mafia movie “The Godfather.”
“I would go into hiding if I were some of these bishops and cardinals who don’t agree with him,” said Mr. Quinlan.
Globally, there is also a divide over the issue. In celebrating the dicastery, Archbishop Franz Lackner, head of the Austrian Bishops’ Conference, told Österreichischer Rundfunk, that while the “relationship between a man and a woman is ‘ideal,’ a relationship between two of the same sex is not entirely without truth: love, loyalty, and even hardship are shared with one another.”
The then-new archbishop of Salzburg (Austria) Franz Lackner receives the Pallium from Pope Francis during a mass at St. Peter's basilica in Vatican on June 29, 2014. Vincenzo Pinto/AFP via Getty Images
France’s Archbishop Hervé Giraud was quoted by the French news outlet La Croix as calling it a “beautiful idea.”
However, the number of high-ranking church officials openly against the idea seems to be growing.
On Thursday, several high-ranking church officials in countries including Ukraine and Zambia condemned the pope’s call to bless same-sex couples, which can only be done in a nonliturgical sense—meaning in private and not as part of a rite or sacrament.
Retired Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano of Italy, who caused a scandal in the church by accusing Pope Francies and other church leaders of covering up sex abuse by a former cardinal, wrote in an opinion piece published on the website of international Catholic news outlet LifeSiteNews, that the pope’s “newly approved blessings for homosexual ‘couples” shows he is a “servant of Satan.”
In a statement published in several Catholic outlets, German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who served as the cardinal-prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said that “blessings” of homosexual couples constitute “blasphemy” and that the document is “self-contradictory” to the Catholic faith.
In the U.K., hundreds of priests also endorsed a declaration released by The British Confraternity of Catholic Clergy.
“With honest parrhesia and from our own experience as pastors we conclude that such blessings [of same-sex couples] are pastorally and practically inadmissible,” the declaration stated.
On a Dec. 19 episode of the Catholic podcast “Godsplaining,” Father Bonaventure Chapman, an assistant professor at the Catholic University of America, and Father Patrick Briscoe, a preacher of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Eucharistic Revival, analyzed at length the rationale behind the pope’s same-sex blessings position and made arguments for and against it.
But when they took questions from their audience, Father Chapman agreed it was probably not the best move for the Catholic church.
“It really is a tricky tightrope to walk,” he said.
