The divisive potential of the statement on the pastoral significance of blessings, which the Vatican published before Christmas to draw global attention, is enormous. What was intended as a guide for the pastoral care of homosexual couples backfires in controlled detonations, as more experiences of discrimination for those affected and as an agitation of the issue within the Church, even leading to a schism. More and more episcopal conferences, and not just in Africa, are distancing themselves from the document, most recently the bishops of Hungary noting: All people can be blessed by pastors “individually, regardless of their gender identity and sexual orientation.” ”; However, common blessings for couples in non-marital partnerships, which also include homosexual relationships, should always be avoided.
Both on the ecclesiastical political right and on the left, those who deviate from the Roman requirement find the explanation now added by the Prefect of Faith Víctor Fernández incomprehensible, according to which blessing couples does not mean blessing relationships: “Couples are blessed. The connection is not blessed.” What platonic concept of a couple is the inspiration here is asked. Are couples nothing more than passers-by who appear together? For pastoral use under the sign of “popular piety” – that is, trusting in the obviousness of a couple's blessing, and then linguistically denying it – an effort of abstraction is made, against which the much talked about question of how many angels can fit at the tip of a needle, represents a fairly harmless thought exercise.
Relevant abstraction effort
Fernández's attempts to provide “clarifications” about his unclear explanation in every possible interview actually result in the repeated inculcation of traditional marital morality in the name of a free and non-ritualized gesture of blessing, including the rejection of any form of extramarital marriage. Sex – which, presented by the prefect of faith on such a principle and above all not in the pastoral context of life, is likely to make revisions of the doctrine very distant.
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Is this explanation perhaps essentially about weatherproofing the Catholic concept of marriage, in a kind of paradoxical intervention, without any paradoxical intention, so to speak? Paul Watzlawick would have liked it. Or is someone here – the Mayor of Faith – so caught up in his own intelligence that he ignores the blessing of latency that Fernández himself speaks of in the “fiducia supplicans” statement? Should all conceivable ideas be dragged into an expressiveness for which the theological substance of the article is then too thin?