Sometimes, it slips my mind that Papa Francesco is a Jesuit. Then he goes and outsmarts the Vatican bluenoses and red hats, and you see why the Society made so many governments nervous down through the centuries. From the New York Times:
The Vatican had long said it could not bless same-sex couples because it would undermine church doctrine that marriage is only between a man and a woman. But the Vatican said in its new rule that a blessing of a same-sex couple was not the same as a marriage sacrament, a formal ceremonial rite. The new rule was issued in a declaration, a rare and important Vatican document, by the church’s office on doctrine and introduced by its head, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who said that the declaration did not amend “the traditional doctrine of the church about marriage,” because it allowed no liturgical rite that could be confused with the sacrament of marriage. “It is precisely in this context,” Cardinal Fernández wrote, “that one can understand the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the church’s perennial teaching on marriage.”
This may look like a baby step from the outside but, for HMC, it’s a giant leap for humanity and for treating its gay parishioners like full members of the people of God, which is what Vatican II called the lot of us. Same-sex couples now can bring Uncle Pat, the family priest, down to city hall, run through the secular ceremony and then Uncle Pat can bless the happy couple and everybody can hit the buffet and the open bar. Not a sacramental ceremony, but a confirmation that the couples are Catholics in good standing, if that’s important to them.
But Francis, who turned 87 on Sunday, has in recent weeks sought to jump-start discussion on the most sensitive topics in his church even as he has cracked down on his most incessant conservative critics. The new declaration is something akin to an executive order outside the more deliberative process he has favored, and it shows that he has come to see the issue of blessing for same-sex couples in terms of his vision of a more pastoral, and less rigid, church.“The request for a blessing,” the declaration states, “expresses and nurtures openness to the transcendence, mercy and closeness to God in a thousand concrete circumstances of life, which is no small thing in the world in which we live. It is a seed of the Holy Spirit that must be nurtured, not hindered.”
There will be hell to pay over this with the conservative upstarts in the Clan of the Red Beanie, but hot damn, this was a slick maneuver.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
