MOYOBAMBA, Peru (LifeSiteNews) – A Peruvian bishop rejected a recent papally approved document, saying it “harms the communion of the Church” and forbidding his priests to bless irregular or same-sex unions.

Bishop Rafael Escudero Lopez-Brea, 61, the ordinary of the Peruvian diocese of Mayobamba, published yesterday a letter to his priests, religious, and laypeople to offer guidance “in the face of the unprecedented confusion caused by the Fiducia supplicans Document […].”

Lopez-Brea explained the damage the document, which suggests that sinful relationships, like those between people in irregular marriages or same-sex partnerships, can be blessed, poses the Catholic Church:

This document harms the communion of the Church, as such blessings directly and seriously contradict Divine revelation and the uninterrupted doctrine and practice of the Catholic Church, including the recent magisterium of Pope Francis, which is why there are no quotations throughout the Declaration that support the previous magisterium. In its 2021 Responsum, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith told us, with the Holy Father’s signature, that “The Church does not have, nor can she have, the power to bless unions of persons of the same sex.”

The bishop called blessing irregular couples and same-sex couples “a grave abuse of the Most Holy Name of God, which is invoked upon an objectively sinful union of fornication, adultery, or even worse, homosexual activity.” He pointed out that the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “homosexual acts are disordered and, above all, contrary to the natural law” (CCC 2357).

“God never blesses sin,” Lopez-Brea added. “God does not contradict Himself. God does not lie to us. God, who always loves the sinner unconditionally, for this reason, seeks that he repent, convert, and live. God desires good for all of us.”

Like many other commentators, the Bishop of Moyobamba noted that the document confusingly says that couples can be blessed, but not unions.

“This distinction leaves us perplexed and confused, for the act of blessing […] remains a blessing of the same nature,” he wrote. “To bless a couple is to bless the union that exists between them. There is no logical, real way to separate one thing from another. Why else would they ask for a blessing together and not two separately?”

The bishop is even more concerned that other bishops and priests have been engaging in the “horrendous sacrilege” of “indiscriminate blessing” of sinful unions.

“The underlying problem is much more serious, and that is that not a few brothers in the episcopate and priests, in contravention of the objective morality of Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition, have for a long time confused the People of God with the indiscriminate blessing of these objectively disordered and therefore sinful unions, incurring horrendous sacrilege,” Lopez-Brea wrote.

He concluded that, “given the lack of clarity in the document,” the priests of his diocese “must follow the Church’s uninterrupted practice to date, which is to bless every person who asks for the blessing, and not same-sex or irregular couples.”

“We will avoid all scandal, confusion, induction to sin, and at the same time we will continue to show the mercy that the Church has always shown to every sinner who approaches her, above all by offering him conversion, forgiveness, the life of Grace and Eternal Life,” he added.

“The Church blesses sinners, but never their sin or their sinful relationship.”

The bishop condemned the efforts of heterodox prelates to legitimize irregular and same-sex unions as destructive and suggested that some are intentionally trying to destroy doctrine:

Dear priests and lay faithful, let us not minimize the destructive and short-sighted consequences resulting from this effort made by some hierarchs of the Church to legitimize such blessings, in some cases with good intentions and in others, as many have been saying, with the intention of destroying the Sacred Deposit of the Church’s Tradition.

Lopez-Brea cited his own oath to uphold the faith before forbidding his priests from blessing sinful unions:

“On the day of my episcopal ordination, I solemnly swore ‘to preserve the deposit of faith in purity and integrity, in accordance with Tradition always and everywhere observed in the Church since the time of the Apostles’,” he recalled.  “For this reason, I admonish the priests of the Prelature of Moyobamba not to carry out any form of blessing of couples in an irregular situation or of same-sex couples.”

Lopez-Brea also encouraged truly repentant sinners to present themselves for blessings and, “even better, sacramental absolution and Holy Communion.”

He did not reflect that Fiducia supplicans has had Pope Francis’ papal sanction. Instead, he exhorted his priests to “continue to cultivate their filial union with the current Pontiff of the Holy Church of God, Pope Francis, those who preceded him, and those who will come.” The operative word here, however, may be “current.”

The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is now under Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, released the 5,000-word document Fiducia supplicans, “On the pastoral meaning of blessings” on December 18, 2023. It was met by approval by the bishops of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium, but rejection by bishop of many countries in the Global South, particularly in Africa, and with caution elsewhere.

Cardinal Fernandez, an Argentinian, is widely believed responsible for the theology underpinning Pope Francis’ controversial 2016 post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia. Cardinal Gerhard Muller, who served as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as it was then, from 2012 until 2017, recently revealed that the CDF had had a file on Fernandez because of concerns about his orthodoxy.