The Blessing Bombshell

Understanding the pope’s declaration about blessings

12/19/2023

Yesterday morning my phone started blowing up with text messages from people concerned with the pope’s decision to allow the blessing of divorced and remarried Catholics and same-sex couples. One person said, “Hey, Father, you may want to address this in a homily.” And I thought, dang, I was supposed to give a short homily today and take a break. Oh well.

My first step was to read the actual statement, technically called a “declaration.” The Latin title – always the first two or three words of the document itself – is “Fiducia Supplicans” which means “supplicating trust.” And the document was written not by Pope Francis himself but his chief doctrinal czar, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez. Although, it was fully approved and authorized by the Holy Father.

As I read the declaration, I kept waiting to find the bombshell, the lines that stated the Church had made some dramatic new change in teaching. Maybe I missed it, but I never found it. The document lays out clearly, in several places, that the Church’s teaching on marriage has not changed. For instance, in no. 4, we read: “Rites and prayers that could create confusion between what constitutes marriage – which is the exclusive, stable, and indissoluble union between a man and a woman naturally open to the generation of children – and what contradicts it are inadmissible…The Church’s doctrine on this point remains firm.” So, that bomb has been diffused: the pope is not changing the Church’s teaching on marriage.

Then, after listing the biblical and theological background on blessings – a very rich section, by the way – the document distinguishes between formal, liturgical blessings and a spontaneous, informal blessing, like when someone asks me to bless a new rosary, or their new baby, or their new car after Mass. In other words, besides the official blessings listed in the Book of Blessings – which every priest gets ten copies of at his ordination – the declaration explains: “There are several occasions when people spontaneously ask for a blessing, whether on pilgrimages, at shrines, or even on the street when they meet a priest” (no. 28).

So, we might say there are Blessings with a capital “B”, which are formal and liturgical, and there are blessings with a small letter “b” which are simple and spontaneous. Not all blessings are created equal. And the declaration’s purpose is to reiterate our firm teaching about the first (big B Blessings) and to invite priests and deacons to be more generous and liberal with the second (little b blessings).

Finally, the declaration gets to the hot-button topics of blessing divorced and remarried Catholics or same-sex couples. Here the document takes pains several times to distinguish between big B Blessings and little b blessings. For instance, we read: “It is essential to grasp the Holy Father’s concern that these non-ritualized blessings [little b] never cease being simple gestures that provide an effective means of increasing trust in God on the part of the people who ask for them, careful that they should not become a liturgical or semi-liturgical act [big B], similar to a sacrament” (no. 36).

By the way, what the pope is saying is essentially something lots of priests, myself included, have been doing for years. At weddings and funerals, for example, I invite everyone in the congregation to come up at Communion. I invite those who are Catholic and can receive Holy Communion to come forward to do so. But I also add that those who are not Catholic or cannot receive Communion – and here I mean Catholics who need to go to confession first, or maybe divorced and remarried Catholics, or even same-sex couples, or Protestants – to fold their arms over their chests to come forward and receive a blessing.

Now, I recognize and respect the fact that not all priests do that. Everyone is trying to use his own pastoral judgment about what is best. Indeed, in many countries and cultures most of the Catholic congregation does not receive Holy Communion but remain in their pews. So, that invitation to receive a blessing, again with a little b, can seem surprising, or maybe even scandalous to some, priests and people alike.

This pastoral practice and sensitivity that is commonplace here in the United States, it seems to me, is what this declaration is trying to encourage world-wide, and suggesting that is the best way to respond to Catholic’s “trusting supplication” of God for his blessings, even though their lives are still a work-in-progress. Thus, we read: “Therefore, the pastoral sensibility of ordained ministers should also be formed to perform blessings spontaneously that are not found in the Book of Blessings” (no. 35). In other words, the declaration is saying be more generous with the little b blessings, but don’t forget we haven’t changed anything regarding the big B Blessings.

My friends, let me encourage you to read the declaration for yourself. It is only 45 paragraphs and will only take a few minutes. The middle section on the biblical and theological background about blessings is rich. I suspect some people may distort what the declaration says – conservatives overly criticizing it, while liberals overly lauding it, but both missing the point. My reading of the text did not find any ticking time-bombs about dramatic changes. It sounded like solid Catholic teaching to me.

Praised be Jesus Christ!