Homosexuals, my Grandma and the Church. On Fiducia supplicans

Monday, December 18^th, 2023, I barely had time to read Fiducia Supplicans, when I received a message from my cousin: “Is it true what our Pope said?” A few days later, in the same week, I met a young Congolese by chance in a bistro, Gare de l’Est in Paris, while waiting for my train to Germany. As soon as I introduced myself as a priest, I was shot again: “Is it true what the Pope said? Don’t get it wrong: the times we live in are an age of deep-fake, you know!”

Note that neither of my two interlocutors, one a believer, the other no longer too sure of it – and none of all those who came in between and after, whatever their faith – doubts that if the Pope says something, it must claim to be true. It’s just that, this time, they didn’t seem to believing their ears or their reason. For the reason that, in the Church, a thing is not true just because the Pope says it: on this point, the Pope himself knows better than those who have been defending him with some lost Latin formula since a couple of days.

It’s true that the Pope has to say things and others, but his words have to resonate with the common sense of Christians – in other words, my grandma, who knows barely a thing about theology, has to “feel”, by some kind of Catholic instinct (the technical term is sensus fidelium), the agreement with the Pope (the servant of God’s servants, the Pope is, moreover, the “last” of the faithful, and is thus in spiritual and intellectual communion with the grandma, more than you’d think). In this sense, we shouldn’t despise the concern that can be heard here and there, the misunderstandings, suspicions and ‘procès d’intention’ that have spread through discussion forums and social media.

The context: Church Politics and a war of buzz

Fiducia supplicans (named after its first Latin words) is a declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith (the DDF), one of the many departments that assist the Pope in his mission: I like to call them the Pope’s theologians. The Pope may refer cases to them, or they may take up questions they find burning and provide all kinds of clarification: this may take the form of “general executory decrees” that are binding like enforceable laws, or of instructions “which clarify the prescripts of laws and elaborate on and determine the methods to be observed in fulfilling them” (Code of canon Law, 33-35), or they may provide specific responses to doubts referred to them (aka responsum ad dubium). In the latter case, to take an example, let’s say your beloved cat has died, and your conscience is suddenly trapped to death in a doubt about the possibility of a paradise for cats. It sounds like a joke, but if you really take the matter seriously and ask for clarification, I bet you’d be taken seriously enough to be given a responsum, often briefly stated (‘negative’ or ‘positive’), followed by an explanatory note.

The not responsum ad dubium

It occurred to me that at the beginning we all read Fiducia supplicans as a responsum ad dubium. Well, it’s not. I guess the December 18^th Declaration falls into the category of instructions. It is intended to clarify the Church’s teaching on blessings. It is therefore a document initiated by the DDF and motivated by the possibility that the meaning and significance of blessings are not very clear for people. Myself and a number of priests are puzzled by this first point. We’re not so sure that in our understanding and practice, the meaning of blessings has become so obscure and problematic that the Pope’s theologians had to bother with it – even if they’d bother for a cat!

So if it’s not directed to all of us, who is the target? What follows is not a pretension to know the arcane of Vatican politics. But it has been obvious to all how a number of cardinals, Raymond Burke and Robert Sarah among others, in a kind of open warfare have not stopped firing in the Pope’s direction from the very beginnings of his pontificate. The former, a renowned jurist – who was once head of the Church’s supreme court, the Apostolic Signatura – was himself relieved of some of his duties a few days after he described (Francis’) Church as a “rudderless ship” at the end of 2014, and was then sent from Rome to Malta to take up full-time a job that, until then, had been at best part-time occupation for a cardinal. He was recently retired, just before he could hand in his resignation on his statutory 75^th birthday (to be replaced by another cardinal aged… 80!), not to mention the rumors, greedily fueled by people said to be close to the Pope, about the possibility that the Pope might deprive him of his apartment in Rome and even of his retirement benefits on the grounds that he was working “against the Church”. Try figure all this out!

Between 2014 and 2017, in the wake of the Synods on the family, Burke and his cronies kept flooding the pope with “doubts” (remember, the kind of question about your cat’s fate!). Then when they weren’t satisfied with the responses – remember again, the answer has to be clear and brief (‘negative’ or ‘positive’) and Francis, to be honest, doesn’t possess the how-to for that – they sent the doubts back again and, worst of all, they made them public. It’s not that a dubium should remain private. But they may be cardinals, what interests them is not necessarily of interest to everyone. The French tabloid La Croix headlined that “dubia” were becoming political weapons in the hands of the Pope’s “opponents”. This is only half true: what is a weapon is not the dubia, but the kind of advertising that began to surround them (about your cat, for example, it’s predictable that the responsum won’t make you jubilant).

In short, those cardinals were having their buzz! The present Declaration, which, without being a response to these doubts, touches them as from the side, therefore seems to me a ballistic weapon, in a proxy war, and this is the second reason to be deeply disappointed with it. If this be true, it simply means the DDF responds to buzz with buzz¹: that is, a nothing that makes a lot of noise. Because it is seemingly a weapon, the document says not that much. In fact, it’s not the Pope who’s speaking. It’s the DDF speaking and vaguely adding that the Pope granted his signature. As we know, there are different forms of signature that the Pope can affix to this kind of document, meaning either that he doesn’t ignore it, or that he has read everything in detail and approves of each and every point². As far as Fiducia supplicans does not give any precision, it must be assumed by way of strict interpretation that the Pope’s signature only means that he has taken good note. So, technically, the Pope says nothing. But the Declaration, I’ll come back to it, doesn’t say much either. And, for this reason, since December 18^th, everyone has been busy discussing not its content but its intents, not the text but its off-texts, its pretexts, its subtexts. It’s not about same-sex couples, as everyone seems to be saying, but about blessings – but who doubts the meaning of blessings?, some ask. It extends blessings to “irregular situations” and names same-sex couples, without mentioning polygamy or polyandry – but who’s the fool?, others ask.

Subject of litigation: the responsum of 2021

With regard to the blessings of same-sex couples, a “dubium” had been submitted to the DDF in 2021, and the Responsum gave the following answer:

This brief response was followed by an explanatory note, and then by a commentary of the note, which reads: “The [explanatory] note is centered on the fundamental and decisive distinction between persons and the union. This is so that the negative judgment on the blessing of unions of persons of the same sex does not imply a judgment on persons.” Of the three reasons added, the last is about the risk of “assimilating the blessing of unions of persons of the same sex to that of matrimonial unions” and the need to avert the semblance “imitation of the nuptial blessing” (likely to cause scandal among the faithful).

For all its subtleties, it doesn’t seem to me that the present Declaration goes beyond this obvious distinction – remember my grandma: she must be able to understand without being a learned theologian. To bless people – she would have told me – it’s impolite to ask them what they do under the bedcover at night! But she, who also understood (and more or less accepted) that her polygamous marriage could not be blessed by the Church, would have understood the argument of this responsum ad dubium. Hence the last reason not to believe one’s ears and reason: why a new document? Could it be that, in the meantime, yet another suspicious move heard here and there, the Chief of Pope’s theologians has changed, and the new one has arrived with a different agenda? And here the ‘procès d’intention’ rolls back all over again.

In short, Fiducia supplicans never ceases to turn you on your head. Instead of simply responding clearly to our unhappy cardinals, the DDF seems to have dropped a bombshell in which the chaos of suspicions and accusations far outweighs the content of the Declaration, if anything.

The text: where it is illicit to smoke while praying but licit to pray while smoking³

As I’ve already said, I don’t believe – but I could be wrong – that the Church’s teaching on blessings has become so obscure that we needed a text on Christmas Eve to avoid making a mess of the Nativity celebrations. But the text must be given the benefit of a reading. And, to put it briefly, the great flaw in this document is that it has neither the means (and perhaps consequently) nor the courage of its position.

I don’t see the problem…

The preamble (the overarching “presentation”) points to an “innovative… contribution (‘a real development’) to the pastoral meaning of blessings”; and this new understanding is opposed to the “classical understanding… closely linked to a liturgical perspective”. A little further on, however, the document itself acknowledges that blessings are given here and there, in shambles, “even on the street when [people] meet a priest” (§28). Is the street a liturgical setting, and do those who give a blessing on the street really link its meaning to… a liturgical understanding? And the embarrassment and inevitable questions begin to mount up: does the famous “classical understanding” being fought against here really exist in reality? In fact, Fiducia Supplicans offers a description of this “classical understanding” that I find difficult to get near to in practice. And it begins in §12, which I quote in extenso:

To my knowledge and in my experience, I have never seen anyone demand moral conditions for granting a blessing or subject it to “too many moral prerequisites”. Even for marriage, what isrequired are more a set of legal/canonical conditions than moral ones. And then, just think of the horde lining up in front of a newly ordained priest or one celebrating his first mass to ask for his blessing, and imagine him subjecting everyone to a thorough interrogation before raising his hands! Instead, he dispatches and prays for it to stop so he can go and drink his beer.

I can’t imagine how a blessing precisely “given on the street” could have the luxury of requiring a lot of detail before being granted. As if a priest had ever made sure that the rosary he was asked to bless hadn’t been shoplifted. If you’ve experienced such a priest, I’ll take your testimony at face value. But I think most priests are busy with other things than demanding so much for a blessing. But Fiducia supplicans, further on, rub it in: “…when people ask for a blessing, an exhaustive moral analysis should not be placed as a precondition for conferring it.” (§25). Exhaustive moral analysis…? Really? For a blessing? And that’s not all: further on, the “classical understanding” is criticized for subjecting the blessing, “a gesture of great value in popular piety to excessive control” (§36).

Let’s say, for the sake of brevity, that if this kind of problem really exists, this document is an adequate response to it. And if it doesn’t exist, it’s still an adequate response to the way the problem is described. And this is said without any sarcasm: §12 points to a “danger” and a risk. Whether that danger is real, present or feared for the future, the question is open. What I say is that, except in the document, I’m looking for it and can’t find it. Unless, the classic understanding serves a purpose we’re not prepared for. And that’s where we fall again from content to intents.

… so I don’t understand the solution!

The brief note of the 2021 Responsum, which is twice referred to as the “responsum of the former Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” (my emphasis⁴), is the real target of the present statement (see §§ 2-11). As we have seen, it called for a distinction to be drawn between the blessing of persons and the blessing of a union between persons. In its strictly doctrinal part, the present declaration merely takes up and develops this elementary distinction. None of the biblical sources quoted or even Pope Francis’ teaching (whatever is said in §26) speak of blessing unions, but of blessing persons (which, again, does not seem raise problems). There’s nothing exceptional with the bulk of the document (§§1-30), which reaffirms the ordinary practice that the only union blessed by the Church is marriage as it understands it. This part has formulas that could be found unchanged in the Responsum of 2021, namely that “rites and prayers that could create confusion between what constitutes marriage… are inadmissible” (§4) “to avoid producing confusion with the blessing proper to the Sacrament of Marriage.” (§31). So, once again, quid novi? Why a document other than the Responsum?

§30 is the one I find the most beautiful, the most balanced. Here the Fiducia Supplicans points to the fact that, if scandal is to be avoided in one direction, it must also be avoided in the other. In other words, if the blessing of an irregular union might be a scandal for some of the faithful, its refusal may be a scandal for others. And I find quite remarkable the recommendation that comes as one of pastoral prudence in §30: without blessing their union, “pastoral prudence and wisdom… may suggest that the ordained minister join in the prayer of those persons who, although in a union that cannot be compared in any way to a marriage, desire to entrust themselves to the Lord and his mercy, to invoke his help, and to be guided to a greater understanding of his plan of love and of truth.” I ask myself why they didn’t just stop there! I wrote in Dieu est assez grand pour se défendre tout seul, and it earned me laughter from some readers that if, in his prayer, a Christian wants to ask for the death of his enemies, no one has the right to prevent him from saying it: it’s not up to anyone to decide what prayer God’s ears are able to bear. It’s up to God to decide whether he answers them or not. An ordained minister who “join in” such a prayer, in which those concerned would ask God to bless their union, need only close his ears if he likes, but he can neither prevent it nor refuse the invitation without being simply impolite. The document could have stopped at §30, and the recommended pastoral prudence would have been sufficient for the “danger” it describes.

But no. Suddenly, §31 bursts out of nowhere, opening with a typically Pauline expression (cf. Rm12:1): “Within the horizon outlined here… appears the possibility of blessings for couples in irregular situations and for couples of the same sex…”. Here, surprised, we pause and wonder: but what horizon? Was there a horizon I missed? Eventually, you reread and notice that nothing had prepared you for the horizon suddenly discovered before your eyes. Maybe the whole process was to lead you there but the way is not straight. As I said at the beginning,Fiducia Supplicanshad neither the courage (to say it bluntly), nor the means to do so: the milestones set up to this point in no way justify or lead to this destination. Courage would have enabled the “opponents” to say a frank “no”, and to have to provide arguments and carry the burden of proof. The means would have allowed to charge them of not bowing to the evidence. We have neither.

The minute before, it seems illicite to bless unions, and the minute after, we can bless “human relationships” (§31) in a horizon which, despite what is said, has not been outlined at all. From arguments justifying the blessing of individuals without excessive controls – provided such controls exist, we can only applaud the recommendation – we jump to the blessing of couples. In other words, the arguments put forward are not consistent with the conclusion and recommendation. All the calls for cautions that follow (especially in §39 and §41) are not enough to make up for what slipped out in §31. And, for all their faults, the reactions of most of the African bishop conferences seem to have grasped this very flaw in the Declaration: each of these publications take up the arguments of Fiducia supplicans without rejecting any of them, without withdrawing an iota from them, but, in the same way, at the end, suddenly, they draw a conclusion and a recommendation radically the opposite of the one drawn by the Declaration: bless individuals but not couples outside marriage. This is how a document which recommends that bishops’ conferences should not get too involved (§37) ends up forcing them to get involved. Yet another involvement and another open battlefield.

Off-texts and pretexts: additional notes to a frustration

The foregoing exercise is, in many ways, unnecessary and overdue. What seems to have interested many about Fiducia Supplicans, as is obvious, is more the pretexts and off-texts than the text itself. Attempting a close-reading is therefore overdue. But I have made it my mission, on this blog, to serve the intellectus fidei (in my own way, of course). And many of my readers (not just Africans, don’t worry) have asked me to comment. I’m grateful for their confidence in my limited means, but it’s the only excuse I have for sticking to this text. Anyway, now that it’s out there, unless it’s challenged before the Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura (Burke & co. would be capable of that) everyone will find their own pretext to pull it in one direction or another. And there are many pretexts for being dissatisfied with it, starting, as you would have noticed, with the reader’s frustrations.

Governing by doctrine

By reader frustration I don’t mean that this is all a purely intellectual matter. Quite the contrary: the government of the Church is what makes intellectual clarity important. One of my teachers in Strasbourg used to say: “Government in the Church is government by doctrine”. When you can’t govern by coercion, when you can’t send the policeman to put things in order or lock people up in prison, all you have left is to convince them so that they see the truth by themselves and embrace it freely. Recently, at a retreat I was preaching, I quipped that any catechesis on the creed nowadays should start from the end. I was thinking of the idea of “eternal life”, which closes the creed. I’d almost forgotten that the last word of the creed is an Amen. And priests and bishops tend to forget that, that their speculations, their explanations, their doctrinal (re)formulations always need the Amen ofthe people. I’m reminded again of my grandma, who needs to be able to understand without me having to impose the sledgehammer of authority on her head. An authority she accepts nonetheless because, despite having a marriage not blessed, she loves the Church and its Pope, cheerfully.

You’ll say it’s up to me to explain to the granny. Not only is this an insult to common intelligence (an insult that Pope Francis has always denounced as clericalism, the posture of those who know and dictate to the ignorant plebs who must take note and kip quiet), but how can I do it if I don’t understand very well (no to mention great theologians I’ve seen helpless over the past days) and if any explanation only adds to the discomfort? Indeed, among the reactions to the Declaration, the pile of exegesis, endless, learned and tiresome, have not removed this impression. I have to say how sorry I am to be indulging in the exercise myself, but my point of view hasn’t changed: no amount of scholarly exegesis convinces me that we needed a document on the meaning of blessings. Nor does blaming the media for simplifying it. If our training as priests is so bad that we need to be reminded of even the most banal points of doctrine, then there is a problem, but it lies elsewhere. Alongside the exegetes, there are those who sing the praises of mercy as if it were a discovery. A confrere of mine wrote to me with amusement that he rejoiced for those who discovered mercy and would personally do penance for the damage they had accumulated before this sudden discovery. And that he didn’t know how a Church that gave its blessing to great criminals, and even knew how to keep their secret when it was confided with contrition in confession, could thus claim in good faith to have forgotten what so intimately lies at its heart.

How far we are not

But deep down, I’m mostly bothered by the kind of mothering compassion the document seems to show people in so-called irregular situations – who are said to be excluded, guilt-ridden, abandoned (§§ 26-27), recommending mercy for them with a great deal of advertisement. Despite the hype of the times, compassion and empathy don’t always do any good: it doesn’t simply victimize, it can actually end up making real victims⁵. Same-sex couples, in particular, are not served by either the document or the publicity surrounding it. Assuming that they, as Catholics, wished to have their unions recognized, this document has not chosen the best of ways to help them.

Two years ago, my then parish pastor, who was leaving for another parish, was eager to organize a service with blessing for same-sex couples before he left (It’s not for nothing that I mentioned Germany in the introduction). He opened up to the pastoral team, and I had the impression, despite my long pastoral experience in Europe, that all the team members were obliquely addressing me, the rear-raised African who had to be convinced of the relevance of the project. I pointed out the possibility of scandal among some of the faithful and added that I didn’t see the relevance of such a project, especially because we had no couple actually asking for it. We’d already angered the Russians of the community by hoisting the Ukrainian flag on the bell tower; shortly before, we’d angered the Covid-vaccine protesters by barring them from the church… so, to mitigate the possibility of another scandal, it was decided to christen the celebration: “blessing of couples of all kinds”. In the end, there were only fifteen people gathered, and not a single same-sex couple among us. The only benefit we got out of it was a big row with some (mainly Polish) parishioners… and a great deal of complacency. Because the next day, as we met, we congratulated ourselves on the success of the previous day’s celebration.

I’m sometimes afraid that this kind of hullabaloo goes no further than this example: to give some priests the “feel-good” conscience that they’re “on the right side of history”, that they’re the chubby good guys against the fat, thick-faced bad guys over there. As our claims to truth have collapsed before the world, we are now directing them against each other in the Church. That’s where the witch-hunt now takes place. For Fiducia supplicans seems to me no more than a tool in a war. The Burkean Conservatives, full of certainties, having received in their dreams the complete scheme of the Church-of-all-times, hurl anathemas at their Liberal friends. And the latter, progressive in their own eyes, having also received in their dreams the outline of the Church-to-come, hurl at the former not anathemas (they no longer know what that means), but the desire to re-educate them with decrees and declarations to force them into line. This is the battlefield, the war in progress between two distinct camps, each convinced that it is on the right side of history, of truth. It’s the parable of a flock with two shepherds. They fight amongst themselves over what the sheep should eat, meanwhile the sheep are dying of starvation. Because no one ever wins a war. And, in the long run, with corpses pilling up among its ruins, history always shows that it doesn’t give a damn about those who, the day before, claimed to be on its side.

On the African reactions: within but beside

Because I’m writing as African, there needs a word, before closing, about the rather unfavorable reception of Fiducia Supplicans by African bishops. In order to force them into one camp (war is raging, you can’t claim neutrality), they will be accused of being conservatives. But it’s enough to listen to one African priest or another talking about Cardinal Sarah to understand that, for them, these liberal/conservative categories don’t mean much. For the Bishops in Africa, this text will therefore also have offered a pretext for making a distinct voice heard. A voice that resonates further back than any of the recent debates, since the African churches decided on a family-centered ecclesiology. It has to be said that their insistence on the Church as the family of God was(and still is) misunderstood, and those who like to reject good ideas on the pretext that they might be misused, accused their bishops, not without some justification, of seeking an easy way to quench their thirst for authority. Fiducia Supplicans istherefore a pretext for them to reintroduce a voice which, precisely during the synods on the family, had been asked to stay low. For, we’ve almost forgotten that in 2014, during the first session of the synod on the family, in a scandal that went almost unnoticed, Cardinal Kasper, who at the time had the Pope’s heart and ear, let himself go and urged the African bishops to shut up and go back to their bushes to look after their flocks instead of meddling in complex issues that were none of their business. (He eventually denied it and the journalist, to embarrass him, published the audio recording).

But Kasper had no idea of the favor he was doing them: the endless quarrels between clergy-conform priests and conciliarists in ties only interest us from afar, sometimes making us laugh, offering us now, I guess, the pretext of situating ourselves within but beside, watching it all from a little distance. Not that we don’t have all these problems, but because these problems, as the unique, suave and wise voice of the bishops of Burkina and Niger made it clear in their communication, well, these problems can wait: in the meantime, we have other things to worry about. (Incidentally, I hope the bishops of Burkina and Niger won’t say any more!⁶) The gesture of the African Bishop conferences is to be welcomed in this precise sense. As Eboussi Boulaga said a long time ago, in a sort of communion with and beside Kasper, the challenge of an African-style theology will begin with the courage to say that some problems are none of our business. It remains to see, in terms of theology, whereto our Churches will move, when the time of taking noisy positions will be over.

Conclusion

The Pope is infallible, the prefects of the DDF are not. This Declaration, which provides no means of either agreeing with it or opposing it, serves neither the Pope, nor homosexuals, nor the rest of God’s people, nor the intelligence of the faith. Our days want any grand declarations to be summarizeable in 140-character. You can disagree with that, but it’s not just Twitter’s fault; it was already the spirit of the old question-and-answer catechisms. Those catechisms of yesteryear were based on the conviction that the great dogmatic formulas could and should be summarizeable in 140 characters. Because the first attribute of God, says Aquinas, is his simplicity. And remember: for the sake of the grandma! It doesn’t take that much effort to explain the Immaculate Conception to her, despite the fact that theologians are still banging on about it! So I don’t blame those who don’t have the time to read Fiducia supplicans and who rely on the headlines. After reading the text, we would have liked to convince them that the media have betrayed the writers’ thoughts. But we must have the courage to say that this is not the case. Whether you agree or disagree with the position « behind » the text, you cannot help but acknowledge this is simply bad logic.

What to do now? Well, nothing. To those who flooded me with messages on December 18^th, I recommended forgetting the document and going for a beer… Because what our Church needs is a great jubilee, a recreation. Proclaim a great jubilee, give the Roman Curia the year off, mark a pause in the “reforms” and take a cure of silence for at least a year: with a Church (in Laudato si, Pope Francis called on us to learn to “stop”) that would make us shut up a little and stop feeding the noise of this world of social medias and constant hubbub, and teach us to trust the workers of the Gospel who, at the very bottom of life, kneaded by the love of the Church, give the best they can every day to make Christ loved. It would do our Church a world of good, and show the world something in the process. Without including him in my palaver, I can’t resist quoting Robert Scholtus:

I’ve often told the homosexuals I know that their situation was that of people having sex outside marriage, that it was forbidden by their Church to all its sons and daughters, and that as far as I know, they weren’t the only Catholics to defy this prohibition. And, if they were really Catholics, they’d get the joke and we’d be able to move on, letting God carry us through this uncertain world, without taking too much load of trip. That’s how I understand doctrine’s task: set fixed rules and guard them but then leave the details to us. Or, as the apostle of common sense, the everlasting Chesterton wrote, put up guard rails so that, inside, we can play, free, like children of God:

1. A blog post published by La Croix, a day after this paper was online, helps understand the following: 1) Gossips have it that Manuel Card. Fernández was the drafting hand behind Amoris Laetitia, the papal exhortation following the synods on family. 2) Burke and friends have been firing at Amoris Laetitia. 3) Meanwhile Manuel Card. Fernández has become the Head of DDF and is… firing back. The post even add that the Declaration didn’t go through the normal process and was not even translated by the Secretary of State, as usual. ↩︎
2. The Regolamento Generale della Curia Romana, fixes those procedures. But I can’t say how far Predicate Evangelium (2023) has changed Pastor Bonus and makes necessary an update of the Regolamento. But as to how this system of approbation can blur the lines of responsibility, this paper in spanish makes some points. ↩︎
3. The formula I borrow from a fellow confrere who used it to qualify the move of Fiducia Supplicans. ↩︎
4. The word « former » which disappeared in the English translation is still in the italian (original?) version and in in the french one. ↩︎
5. Laura Stevens, Poor Indians ↩︎
6. Update: a friend has been kind enough to make me realize that there was a follow-up to the first reaction of the Bishops of Burkina and Niger. So it amounts to two letters from that Bishop Conference. Well, I still wish they didn’t. ↩︎