Catholic Sexual EthicsAnswered

Is Fiducia Supplicans' blessing of 'two people who love each other' rather than the couple a deceptive trap?

A viewer, discussing the Pope's 60 Minutes interview and Fiducia Supplicans, asks Robert's assessment of the document's distinction between blessing a same-sex union, which it forbids, and blessing the two persons in the relationship, which it permits.

Answer

The document traps itself. It says a same-sex union cannot be blessed because marriage is defined as the union of a man and a woman open to new life, and then it turns around and blesses the two persons in that relationship. But if the union is admitted not to be a marriage, why drag marriage in at all, unless the point is to make it look as though something good was done without touching the definition of marriage? So set marriage aside; everyone agrees the definition is not being changed. The real question is what 'union' means. It cannot be legal, because the Church does not recognize a homosexual legal union; it cannot be spiritual, because no pope, tradition, or Scripture has ever spoken of a spiritual homosexual union. The only union left is the physical one, their sexual intercourse, and the document says it does not bless that union, yet blesses the two persons who are engaged in it. If they genuinely want to be faithful to God and grow in their Christian life, then the Church should tell them to stop sinning, as Jesus told the woman caught in adultery to go and sin no more; but not one word of that comes from the Vatican. When the pope says, 'I do not bless a homosexual marriage, I bless two people who love each other,' the problem is that two men cannot love each other in that way, because sexual acts between them are not love but lust, just as I cannot claim to love my neighbor's wife by having sex with her. So blessing the couple, while never calling them to repentance, unofficially condones the relationship, and that is the deception at the heart of the document.

Dr. Robert Sungenis

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