- LIFE SITE NEWS - Mar 15, 2021 -
Pete Baklinski -
ROME, March 15, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – The Catholic Church cannot bless homosexual relationships, the Vatican declared today, calling such blessings “illicit.”
A question to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith about whether or not the Church has the “power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex” was answered in the “negative” by the congregation’s prefect, Luis Cardinal Ladaria Ferrer. The congregation’s statement was assented to by Pope Francis. While the statement was signed Feb. 22, it was only released today.
The Congregation stated that it is “not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex.”
“The presence in such relationships of positive elements, which are in themselves to be valued and appreciated, cannot justify these relationships and render them legitimate objects of an ecclesial blessing, since the positive elements exist within the context of a union not ordered to the Creator’s plan,” the statement read.
Blessings for homosexual couples has been especially pushed by Catholic Church leaders in Germany, such as Cardinal Reinhard Marx and other bishops who are part of the country’s “Synodal Path,” and have called for a blessing of such relationships liturgically.
The Catholic Church teaches that homosexuality is one of the four sins that cry to heaven for justice. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered’. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved” (CCC 2357).
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