(LifeSiteNews) — A trio of prominent Catholic intellectuals have joined the ranks of those opposing the Vatican’s document Fiducia Supplicans and its subsequent press release, warning that the two texts “tend to suggest that … doctrine does not matter very much.”
“The truth at stake, which it is a serious responsibility of pastors to communicate, is that sexual acts are gravely immoral unless they express and actualize a committed and exclusive marital union, the kind of union within which new human beings are entitled to be born and raised,” closed a newly published article in First Things.
Warning that the Church had spread “more confusion about same-sex blessings,” the critique of Fiducia Supplicans was written by prominent former professor of natural law and legal philosophy at Oxford, John Finnis; Robert George, professor of jurisprudence at Princeton; and Father Peter Ryan, S.J., a professor at Sacred Heart Major Seminary and former official for the USCCB.
In their tightly-worded analysis of Fiducia Supplicans and the January 4 press release from Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández defending the text, the trio outlined a series of reasons to not practice the “blessing” of same-sex “couples.”
They wrote to “urge that bishops and priests should not authorize or provide the blessings at issue: the circumstances in which they will avoid doing grave harm are rare, if not practically non-existent—at least without the set of conditions we will mention.”
While Fernández’s January 4 press release had sought to defend his Fiducia Supplicans text from the criticism and opposition that it had received, the three academics said that it “only accentuates aspects of Fiducia Supplicans that make it an obstacle to handing on, defending, and living by the gospel’s teaching on sexual morality.”
“The press release is grossly inadequate,” they wrote. “Heeding it will not begin to prevent the grave harm that the DDF [Dicastery (formerly Congregation) for the Doctrine of the Faith] says it had hoped to head off.”
They highlighted how Fiducia Supplicans ignored the clear teaching contained in the CDF’s own 1975 document Persona Humana regarding morality and human sexuality.
Warning about Fernández’s careful avoidance of the terms “‘sin,’ let alone ‘grave sin’ or ‘mortal sin,’ when speaking of ‘irregular unions,’” the trio stated that such an omission resulted in grave eventualities:
These references suggest, if not affirm, that there is no crucial moral or pastoral difference between (a) blessing people who happen to be sinners, and (b) blessing people as parties to a relationship expressed in sinful acts. Never has the Church authorized a blessing under a description that identifies the recipients by reference to their sin (e.g., a blessing for pornographers as such).
The academics dealt in great detail about the manner under which Fiducia Supplicans might potentially be implemented so as to give a blessing to individuals in immoral relationships rather than to the relationship itself. Such an event could only occur under set conditions – conditions which, they argued, Fiducia Supplicans appeared to instruct priests not to set.
Therefore, “[t]o forgo conditions like those above is thus an act of grave pastoral irresponsibility,” the trio stated.
Fernández’s January 4 press release “all but guarantees that people will miss the distinction between blessing couples and blessing their sinful unions.”
Highlighting the likely problems of “real-world cases” of blessings, the academics added how such cases “are largely concerned with couples whose demeanor or other circumstances make it obvious that they have a sexual relationship and, in the case of same-sex couples, one identifiable as immoral because of the obvious impossibility for the sexual relationship to be marital.”
As a result, they wrote that the few clarifications the January 4 press release gave, in order to prevent same-sex “blessings” being equated with marriage, are insufficient:
Those conditions are not designed to sustain the distinction between blessing persons and blessing the sinful acts that they present themselves as willing to engage in.
In light of such, the trio warned that Catholic doctrine risks being gradually eradicated, since the the CDF’s text’s “silences and complacencies, while not denying Catholic doctrine on sexual activity, tend to suggest that that doctrine does not matter very much.”
Instead, the academics called on priests to practice the “true mercy and eminent charity” of Persona Humana and Scripture, namely, to teach that “to find salvation, a person must hold fast to the sanctification received at baptism by avoiding or repenting of all grave sins, including sexual sins.”