A metropolitan archbishop has become the first prelate to issue guidance to his flock on the Vatican’s declaration allowing same-sex blessings. In it he firmly prohibits priests and faithful from accepting or performing any form of blessing of couples in an irregular situation and same-sex couples.
In a statement dated December 19, and sent to all priests and parishes in his archdiocese, Archbishop Tomash Peta of Saint Mary in Astana, Kazakhstan, together with Auxiliary Bishop Athanasius Schneider, firmly contend that the new declaration, Fiducia supplicans, is a “great deception”, and that its proposed blessings of same-sex couples “directly and seriously contradict Divine Revelation and the uninterrupted, bimillennial doctrine and practice of the Catholic Church”.
The declaration, issued on December 18 by Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith Prefect Cardinal Manuel Fernández, and signed by Pope Francis, claims to offer an “innovative contribution to the meaning of blessings” which allows the “possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage”.
While affirming that the Church “does not have the power to impart blessings [proper to the sacrament of marriage] on unions of persons of the same sex”, the declaration permits priests to offer a non-liturgical and “spontaneous pastoral blessing”, i.e. a new category of blessing, to such couples.
In his statement responding to the declaration, Archbishop Peta, a native of Poland, warns priests and faithful that “this effort to legitimize such blessings” will have “far-reaching and destructive consequences” and, at least in practice, turns the Catholic Church into a “propagandist” of “gender ideology”
