The unbearable confusion of Fiducia Supplicans
Considering its antecedents, that Fiducia Supplicans (“Supplicating Trust”) came off like a bomb was to be expected. Released on Dec. 18, 2023, on the Feast of the Expectation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the document from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) purported to extend pastoral care to all individuals, specifically by allowing priests to give blessings to individuals in “irregular” relationships, particularly same sex couples, those cohabiting outside of marriage, and those in adulterous relationships.
The reaction to the document was, however, to put it mildly, comically catastrophic. After the initial giddy gloating of “progressive” media (from Rappler to the Jesuit’s America Magazine), a series of very public pronouncements from numerous Catholic clergy came out expressing concern. Amongst the first was the British Association of Priests, then Kazakhstan’s Archbishop Tomasz Peta and Auxiliary Bishop Athanasius Schneider weighed in, then Cardinal Robert Sarah, former prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, afterwards practically all the bishops from the whole of Africa.
Predictably, the usual “popesplainers” tried to brush the controversy off as a mere media construct. But then Eric Sammons correctly pointed out: “As commonly happens with such controversial documents, many Catholics are trying to blame the media for misrepresentations of the text. ‘The pope didn’t approve of blessings for same-sex relationships!’ ‘This doesn’t change anything!’ and other such nonsense.
“The guiding principle of this document is that it is a teaching of Pope Francis, and Pope Francis alone. Of the 31 footnotes found at the end of the text, 20 of them (65%) reference the current pope. There is absolutely no attempt to situate this novel practice within the Catholic tradition.” (“Breaking Down Fiducia Supplicans,” Crisis Magazine, December 2023).
The problem was more succinctly laid out by Charles Chaput, Philadelphia Archbishop emeritus (“The cost of making a mess,” First Things, December 2023): “relationships that the Church has always seen as sinful are now often described as ‘irregular.’ This neuters the reality of morally defective behavior and leads to confusion about what we can and can’t call ‘sin.’”
In response to those that claim the Catholic Church needs to be more “inclusive,” Archbishop Chaput had this to say: “If ‘inclusive’ means including people who do not believe what the Catholic faith teaches and will not reform their lives according to what the Church holds to be true, then inclusion is a form of lying” (“Archbishop Chaput welcomes ‘smaller church’ of holier Catholics,” National Catholic Reporter, October 2016).
Sammons puts it another way: “It’s not hard at all to imagine that many people ask for a blessing because they are asking for approval. After all, if a priest blesses something, it must be okay, right? And that’s the common understanding, not the exception. So, despite [DDF Chief Cardinal Victor Manuel] Fernández’s lofty description of why people ask for a blessing, many people (likely most people) see it as a form of official approval on their relationship.”
And yet, Archbishop Chaput reminds us: “an essential task of a loving pastor is to correct as well as accompany. Blessings should encourage, but also, when necessary, challenge. People in samesex and other non-marital sexual unions need a challenging accompaniment from the Church. Popes, bishops, priests, and deacons are called by their vocations to be prophets as well as pastors. Pope Francis often seems to separate these roles while Jesus himself always embodied both in his ministry. His words to the woman caught in adultery were not simply ‘Your sins are forgiven’ but also ‘Go and sin no more.’”
But the definitive judgement on the document is perhaps from two non-priests. John Finnis (Oxford Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy Emeritus) and Robert P. George (Princeton’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence), with Peter Ryan, S.J. (Sacred Heart Major Seminary’s Blessed Michael J. McGivney
Chair in Life Ethics), all genuine and recognized experts on ethics, legal philosophy, and theology, provide us a clear, non-polemical, objective, and analytically sober account of Fiducias Supplicans:
“All these silences and complacencies [surrounding Fiducias Supplicans], while not denying Catholic doctrine on sexual activity, tend to suggest that that doctrine does not matter very much. They suggest that it is at most a matter of ideals, rather than moral absolutes knowable by reason and confirmed by divine revelation. But true mercy and the eminent charity extolled by Persona Humana — the charity that never diminishes the saving teaching of Christ — requires pastors to teach forthrightly what St. Paul taught (see 1 Cor. 6:9-11): 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. 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.
“By commending a practice that, without all the needed conditions, will obscure that truth of faith and reason, the DDF’s pair of documents creates a large new obstacle to fulfilling a pastoral responsibility that is also an imperative of evangelization.” (“More confusion about same-sex blessings,” First Things, January 2024).
All the foregoing criticism and popular rejection of Fiducia Supplicans shouldn’t be seen as taking away from the credibility of the Catholic Church and the verisimilitude of its teachings. Neither should it be seen as undermining the Petrine Office. Interviewed by Catholic Herald (“Don’t give up on the Church — and certainly not because of Fiducia Supplicans,” December 2023), Scott Hahn, respected theologian and a prominent faithful of Opus Dei, correctly observes: “We shouldn’t have an idealized view of the papacy. Some Popes are good, some are bad, some are fair, others are great, and some are saints, but most are not. This is the living reality of the papacy.”
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The views expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of the institutions to which he belongs.
JEMY GATDULA read international law at the University of Cambridge. He is the dean of the Institute of Law of the University of Asia and the Pacific and is a Philippine Judicial Academy lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence.