A VATICAN official has denied claims made by the Roman Catholic Church in Germany that Rome has approved same-sex blessing ceremonies, almost two years after the document Fiducia Supplicans first permitted RC priests to bless homosexual couples.
“Our Dicastery didn’t approve anything,” the Prefect of the Dicastery for Doctrine of Faith, the Argentinean Cardinal Victor Fernández, told The Pillar, a US-based RC news agency.
“We sent a letter some time ago to the German bishops’ liturgical commission, indicating that it cannot approve any form of ritualisation of these blessings. Any form of ritualisation, as the Pope has said, is expressly excluded in Fiducia Supplicans.”
Cardinal Fernández was reacting to the suggestion by the chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, the Bishop of Limburg, the Most Revd Georg Bätzing, that guidelines for same-sex blessing services, published last April, had been given prior Vatican approval as a “pastoral concretisation” relating to “the situation in Germany”.
“We developed this document transparently with the Dicastery and in consultation with it,” Bishop Bätzing said at a plenary in Fulda in late September. “I clearly reject the insinuation that we in Germany are practising episcopal disobedience toward Rome or embarking on a confrontational course.”
The Vatican declaration, published in December 2023, conditionally allowed priests to bless same-sex couples spontaneously, “outside of a liturgical framework”, but it has been openly rejected by some conservative Bishops’ Conferences, especially in the global South (News, 5 January 2024).
The 2100-word German “Handbook for Pastors”, authorised by the German Bishops’ Permanent Council, was published between the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV. It offers “practical guidelines”, with readings and songs, for blessing people in “irregular unions”, but has been adopted by fewer than half the 27 RC dioceses in Germany.
In an interview last month with the American RC Crux news agency, Pope Leo said that he was concerned that “rituals of blessing” were being “published in Northern Europe” in violation of Fiducia Supplicans.
“I do understand that this is a very hot-button topic and that some people will make demands to say, ‘We want recognition of gay marriage,’” the Pope said.
“Any priest who has ever heard confessions will have heard from all kinds of people with all kinds of issues, all kinds of states of life, and choices that are made. I think that the Church’s teaching will continue as it is.”