The Dutch bishops, once known for their progressive leanings, have collectively rejected the Vatican’s recent opening to the blessing of same-sex couples.
While embracing the Vatican’s call for “closeness and accompaniment” for persons living in a homosexual relationship and for re-married divorced persons, the Dutch bishops reject the novelty of blessing gay couples introduced by the Vatican’s December 18 text titled Fiducia Supplicans.
In their 292-word response to Fiducia Supplicans, the bishops note that it is possible to say a prayer over individual believers living in an irregular relationship, something the Catholic Church has always held.
“In this prayer, God can be asked for strength and assistance under the invocation of His Spirit, so that he/she may understand God’s will with his/her life and continue to grow,” they state, in a clear distinction from blessing the couple itself.
“This makes it clear in the wording chosen that this is not a blessing or confirmation of an irregular relationship and also avoids confusion with marriage, which, according to the Catholic Church, can only be between a man and a woman,” they add.
In this statement, the Dutch bishops effectively revert to the prior Vatican teaching that individual persons can be blessed but irregular relationships cannot.
In its 2021 statement in this regard, the Vatican’s doctrinal office said that blessings may be “given to individual persons with homosexual inclinations, who manifest the will to live in fidelity to the revealed plans of God as proposed by Church teaching,” whereas it would be illicit to confer “any form of blessing that tends to acknowledge their unions as such.”
God Himself “does not and cannot bless sin,” that statement asserted, and thus “the Church does not have, and cannot have, the power to bless unions of persons of the same sex.”
The Dutch bishops are the latest ecclesiastical conference to take issue with the novel teaching of Fiducia Supplicans, which seems to many to contradict the Church’s constant moral teaching on the matter.
The African bishops’ conferences, as well as the bishops’ conferences in Hungary, Poland, and Kazakhstan have all refused the Vatican’s call to allow non-liturgical blessings to people in irregular relationships.
For their part, the French bishops’ conference embraced Fiducia Supplicans but nine French bishops publicly dissented from the demand to bless same-sex couples.