Introduction
1. Fiduchia Supplicans, the declaration by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on the Pastoral meaning of Blessings shocked many people and has precipitated many criticisms even by high-ranking members of the Church. Many people believe that including gay couples as potential recipients of pastoral blessings is heretical and will mislead people about salvation.
By signing the declaration, the Holy Father closed the door to antagonistic debates, especially those casting alternative opinions as insufficient or defective. Nevertheless, because of the criticisms encountered a respectful sharing of perspectives in union with the directive can be helpful. Even though the Declaration is clear, alternative perspectives can help some people come to a more faithful understanding.
2. Fiducia Supplicans is a practical document. It only goes into detail sufficient to justify what it asks for counting on the shared Faith. Because of its practical nature, it leaves in its trails a lot of implications about sin, the process of salvation, the meaning of salvation, the human person, freedom and even political conduct. It for example implicitly suggests that the criminalization of homosexuality is immoral. It also suggests that conversion therapy may be the wrong course of action. It suggests that any effort to transform the person must proceed by considering that the other person (partner) has something good in them. The most consequential of implications is the acknowledgment of gay relationships. They do exist. This is something that Pope Francis has reiterated as a fact. We can also note that the Catechism in section 2358 also implicitly acknowledges the existence of gay relationships in acknowledging the rather the deep-seated tendency towards among a non negligible number of people.
It is because of this trail of implications that many people have opposed it vehemently. It is deeper and I will dare to say richer than it immediately appears to be, capable of reaching to the very heart of the Gospel and of the evangelization of those living in habitual sin who seek grace. For its depth, it deserves a thorough analysis that goes back both to the gospel and at the same time to the human person in their entirety uniting the Gospel with the lived experience of the pilgrim.
Such a thorough unbiased analysis is also relevant because many good and good willed persons oppose it in good Faith. It is not easy to digest, and the Pope in allowing it through must have gone to the very bottom of his I would say very deep heart. But it is also relevant, because such an analysis can help to address perpetual social issues that plague political discourses and politicians presenting diabolical choices requiring such wisdom that only Christ exhibited in his interactions with the Pharisees. It is for this reason that this document will also be tagged as political.
3. I had wished to embark on writing such a piece before publishing this shorter “biased” version. However, I came to appreciate that I do not have sufficient time to undertake such a project within the time frame I would have desired. God willing, I will come back to address this issue in the future.
As I wait to complete that, I will share this version. It is for you, if you have faith and hope also in the office of the Pope and have found it difficult to understand how the Pope could allow such a proposition. It is for you if you believe and want to believe more and understand. Since it assumes some level of faith-in and good-will towards the Pope it is NOT for you if you are vehemently opposed to Pope Francis or have doubtlessly rejected the declaration. Your’s would be the ‘unbiased’ version which will come in future God willing.
In case it is of interest and helpful, I am a husband and Father in the ‘traditional sense’ just for avoidance of ambiguity. I have a Ms Degree in Information Technology and Bachelors in Food Science. But I am many things, with wide knowledge in a number of areas. Interested in philosophy, theology, psychology and many other fields.
God is Almighty
4. One of my clan-grandmothers (RIP) suffered immense ridicule because she was barren. Twice, she attempted suicide. On the first occasion, she saw a man in a white garment as she was about to let go of the rope to hang herself. On the second occasion, she fell asleep as she waited to pass over water by train so she could jump off and drown. Eventually, with the help of some herbs given by certain relatives, she gave birth to three sons.
There is nothing in this universe that happens that God is not aware of, even remotely. It is a question of faith to hold that God permits all that has happened to take place and that all of that is for the good of those who love God as St Paul teaches us. So that in the end, all can say Jesus Christ is Lord. God is almighty. Jesus reminds his disciples of this on many occasions.
The story of Saul turned Paul is a testament to the jealous protection that Christ gives his Church. Christ (the new Adam) protects his bride the Church in a way that counters Adam’s failure from protecting Eve in the garden of Eden (Gen 3:6). In Adam’s failure, Eve became the mother of those “dead to sin”. In Christ’s victory, the Church becomes the mother of the living. Christ will not permit the Church to become the mother of the dead.
5. We need to be conscious of this fact because God is the guide and protector of the Church. Whatever he has permitted to happen to and in the Church, is to help the Church in her work of evangelizing until the end of time. Nothing happens without God allowing it to happen, not a random accident or a deliberate suicide. Since the Holy Father has the charism to lead and guide the Church, we are bound by Faith and charity to read positively his non infallible but authoritative judgments. Some judgments are made outside the confines of infallibility precisely because they can’t be applied universally.
A question of Salvation
6. At the heart of the criticism of Fiduchia Supplicans is a fear that it opens alternative avenues for salvation that do not require achieving moral perfection or encourage people to strive for moral perfection. In so doing, it misleads and will cause some people to lose their salvation.
For those who criticize Fiducia Supplicans, moral perfection is the starting point of salvation. They draw heavily from concepts in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor (Splendor of Truth) written to address relativism within the Church. For them, blessings must follow a commitment to moral perfection. Moreover, gay relationships are particularly depraved and irredeemable to justify any blessings.
It is important to note that Fiduchia Supplicans recognizes this obligation of commitment to moral perfection and presents safeguards to prevent the misuse of pastoral blessings. In some ways, it can even be argued that Fiducia Supplicans introduced guard rails to a practice that was already happening in some parts of the world.
It would be helpful to note that unlike Pope John Paul II, a ‘natural’ philosopher, or Pope Benedict XIV, a ‘natural’ theologian, Pope Francis is a Pastor at heart. He deeply knows the difference between people who justify their sins because they are corrupt and those who are miserable sinners trapped in a bondage they do not fully understand. Each of these Pontiffs brought their unique giftings to the Church according to the providence of God just like each of us is called to bring our gifts for the benefit of all.
7. The encyclical Veritatis Splendor expounding on the conversation between Jesus and a certain rich young man concludes that salvation requires objective moral perfection as a prerequisite. Apart from this, there are at least three other passages where Jesus directly addresses the issue of salvation. The first is with Nicodemus (Jn 3), the second is with the Samaritan woman (Jn 4:13-14), and the other is with the Jews (Jn 6:35-40). The second and third incidents relate to Jesus as the source of life, the water that is a living fountain, and the food that comes down from heaven which all reference the Eucharist in one way or another.
The first references and brings to fulfillment Old Testament scripture. It draws from passages in Jeremiah (Jer 31:31-34) and Ezekiel (Ez 36:24-29) that lament the inability of Israel to keep the law because of their stony hearts and promises a new heart. This inability is due to a deficiency in humanity caused by the sins of Adam and Eve. God promises his people a new heart through rebirth by water and the spirit. This rebirth with water and spirit will give people the grace of new life that will enable them to obey the commandments and facilitate the establishment of the everlasting Kingdom of the son of David. For Christians, this re-birth is through the sacrament of Baptism. Pope John Paul II is mindful of this grace when he says every Christian should be free of grave moral failings.
No one can achieve moral perfection without grace. The person who thinks that their perceived moral perfection comes from some thing they do or have done or who they are is only forgiven because they are ignorant. Even our prayers are fruitful only because God has given us the grace, when done without the grace of God, they remain dead and fruitless. First comes grace, then moral perfection. This St Augustine reflecting on the letters of St Paul reminds us, moral imperfection is permitted so that grace might be sought.
St. Paul expresses this mystery of the works of grace about some people abandoned to debauchery because of their idolatry (Rm 1:24-28).
Afflictions of Sin
8. Contrary to expectations, experience tells us that moral imperfection persists among the baptized. St. Paul expresses his frustration about his life of sin (Rm 7:13-24), lamenting a thorn in his flesh given to him to prevent him from becoming too proud (2 Cor 12:7-8).
Afflictions of sin can reflect failures in the community. They mirror positive actions that the individual and community need to take to bring healing and goodness to its members. They mirror challenges along the individuals’ “way of the cross (their way of salvation)” that they have not yet surmounted the courage and strength to confront, but can also be guard rails like in the case of St Paul, protecting people from becoming a reincarnation of Lucifer the proud. They can also be personal challenges and often reflect personal challenges since structural problems in the community will not necessarily cause all persons to commit similar sins. We know all of this because we know that children growing up in dysfunctional families and communities are more likely to turn out delinquent.
9. Being delinquent is destructive and will invariably cause pain. It is an invitation precisely because of such pain to seek and to bring healing to the community. Many people have turned themselves around and brought with them healing and knowledge for the betterment of the community. The good of the community lies with the delinquents because they receive the greatest beatings for the ills of the community. And their healing brings the greatest knowledge, hope, and goodness to the community to the glory of God.
Every affliction of sin should invite reflection, prayer, and repentance for the community and the Church. Each affliction of sin wounds Christ and his Church – each member of the Church. Each affliction is a reflection of pain on the part of the afflicted who are not able to fully experience the joy of living in the grace and love of God.
In the person of Christ
10. “Go and sin no more” the words of Jesus to the adulterous woman (Jn 8:1-11) are quoted by many in criticism of Fiduchia Supplicans. For this school, charity is being truthful to the wayward who need repentance. On the opposite side of the divide are those who reference the hypocrisy of the Pharisees.
What is rarely perceived are the circumstances that enabled the diabolical attack by the Pharisees in the first place. The Gospels do not give us precedent to conclude that Jesus was inclined to save the woman other than by tying strings and stretching logic. For the Jews, adultery was not comparable to tax collection or other sins. There was no reason for the Pharisees to consider such a ploy sufficient to trap Jesus. Yet for reasons not explicitly stated, the Pharisees were confident that Jesus would be inclined to save her. More than us, they understood the extent to which Jesus loved sinners.
It seemed the model of operation for Jesus, showing people that they are loved and valued first. We see this with Zacchaeus who upon being blessed to host Jesus is moved to conversion, repentance, and restitution (Lk 19:1-9). St. Paul reiterates this when he says Christ offered his life so that we might live while we were still sinners. Jesus is the good shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to search for the one. With his eyes, he sees not depraved sinners but lost sheep and people under bondage.
It is easy to say, “Go and sin no more”, but how many of us would attract the diabolical scheme of the Pharisees?
11. It is helpful to reconsider the human perception that some sins are “greater” or more “depraved” than others. There is no doubt the temporal consequences of sins differ. From the eternal perspective, however, the one who calls his friend a fool and the one who commits adultery will both answer from the fires of hell. To say otherwise denies people an opportunity to remove the log in their eyes and thereby participate in building and healing the body of Christ.
12. Beyond the fact that Jesus deeply loved sinners, looking at them as lost sheep rather than as depraved people. The encounter teaches the human community a crucial but underappreciated lesson.
Communal laws are a source of knowledge, especially for the young whose philosophy about life is developing. Every law and edict must maintain the good as good and the bad as bad. Anything else deceives the young and vulnerable. Young people are vulnerable since they develop a moral compass from the laws and practices within their community. Bad laws not only cause the young wounds by deceiving them about the value of their actions and covering the resulting wounds with bandaids. They also cause more degeneration because young people reason in a straight line.
It is for such reasons that it is immoral to use child soldiers. For them, killing is the same thing. It matters when the opponent is carrying a gun only because the alternative is death. The community has every obligation to ensure that its laws communicate the good as good and the bad as bad.
13. However, not all responses to violations are moral or just. Some responses bring healing neither to the individual nor the community. Instead, they exacerbate and perpetuate problems. This is especially true when the response blinds the community to the root causes of the immoral actions. In such cases, it’s not just the added pain of those harshly treated. It is the pain of those who love and depend on those on whom harsh treatment has been levied and those who will suffer the same harsh treatment because of unaddressed root causes and the misdirected and squandered resources of the community. A community that does not address the root causes of failure among its young will continue to witness failures no matter how they treat the aberrant persons.
Moreover, such harsh treatments are not lost on the community and evoke a counter-response that seeks to nullify and bring justice to those harshly treated. To find such justice, it becomes necessary to reject a law which, although maintaining something good, uses immoral courses of action. In so doing, sometimes what is bad has ended up being portrayed as good and desirable. In the end, we have communities always at war about the good, with precedents overturning precedents.
Our communities must separate moral questions from the proper responses to those questions and evaluate each independently. The community must ask if an action is moral. And then proceed to ask itself how it must respond to an immoral act in a moral way. In a way that achieves the good for all, especially those who have failed or who fail since any immoral action wounds them first.
14. It is precisely for these reasons that the Church must find positive ways to help gay people in communities in which it is difficult to be gay for legal or social reasons. In these places, only the Church can be a sanctuary.
While the Church must do all to cooperate with civil authorities, she cannot celebrate laws blind to the pain and struggles of the wayward or rely on such laws as a primary guide for her Pastors to treat the wayward. Moreover, the Church must be wary of politicians. The power of politics is a magnet for demagogues who neither fear God nor value people or laws but who nonetheless pretend and use the constituents of the Church to usurp power. We see this happening today in many places, despicable things done in the name of God and sometimes of the Church. It is such associations that have caused many to lose their faith in God.
Harsh laws and deterrent penalties can denigrate the law or the people for whom the law is made. They can only be valid if the law is not sensible and can only be implemented through fear or if the people for whom the laws are made are not sensible. In the latter case, we end up with a tiered community, with a certain group of people who are sensible and possess a unique superior capacity to follow and implement the law and another group who due to their lack of sensibility must be compelled by fear to follow the law.
Couples
15. Fiduchia Supplicans has been criticized especially because of the inclusion of “gay couple”. The inclusion of “couple” for some translated to a legitimization of an unnatural unproductive form of sex that cannot produce any positive good subject to blessing. Removing “gay couple” would have made it more acceptable in places where social, economic, and cultural pressures predispose people to family life.
Places where the rainbow lost its naturality and innocence and has become associated with the sexual grooming of young people using funds obtained from Western agencies. In such communities, it would seem like pastoral blessings for gay couples are the door through which homosexuality becomes accepted. For these communities, homosexuality is perceived as degenerate sexual orgies. This concern of legitimization is also raised with reference to organized lobbies that rally people to seek blessings not in search of grace but to legitimize their status.
16. There is no questioning the fact that Fiduchia Suplicans will be abused. If it was not abused, it would have no good. All sin is an abuse of a good in search of a good. For this reason, healing from sin must involve learning to look at the object of sin with its true dignity and purpose. This is true of all irregular unions both gay and straight.
It is precisely from this recognition that in the object of sin there is something good being sought that it becomes possible for us to appreciate that gay relationships can be moved by a love capable of perceiving something good in the other person. And except for its sexualisation, there is nothing wrong or sinful about gay love. And that it is possible for this love to be expressed without sex. This is the foundation of the teaching of the Church that gay people are called to chastity and to a ‘selfless’ friendship. This is the aim and the justification for Fiducia Supplicans. That gay couples can come to have a friendship that is selfless, interested in the true good of the other person.
Fiducia Supplicans differs from other approaches in not assuming to know how this journey will take place. It is trustful of the infinite grace of God who wills freedom for all and makes a way for the very worst of humanity to find salvation. It invites them to seek the grace of God, trustful of the singularity of the grace of God. A singularity which makes it possible that a grace obtained in one avenue of life changes just not that one part but transforms the whole person. It invites them to seek from God a path to a more blessed life which only they can fully know, but not without the help of God. The gay couple must come to God and seek from him the graces to see the highest good in their ‘partner’ so that they can live a life of true selflessness.
17. We note here also that sex is not always a valid expression of love even among married people. The sexualization of love is not just a homosexual problem, it afflicts our community so much that love for a younger person which should evoke sentiments of protection sometimes evokes a sexual urge or a repulsion born of fear. Sex has polarized our community so much that two boys can no longer be just friends. I believe that the sexualization of “gay” love is a problem that originates with the sexualization of heterosexual love. This is why the call to chastity is valid for all.
It is also important to note Fiduchia Suplicans anticipates the possibility of a “gay relationship” that is chaste in forbidding an exhaustive moral analysis of the participants.
18. Pastors have every obligation to discern for those who come to justify their status rather than to seek the grace of God. It is their obligation to bless not unions but people and to discern the blessings sought just like it is with respect to confession. The Pastors’ blessing should be discrete akin to that of the good shepherd (Jn 10:11-18) who seeks out for the lost having “left” the ninety-nine.
In places where social, cultural, economic, and political pressures make it impossible for gay couples to exist, positive avenues of interaction capable of communicating the love of God with respect must be sought. Such pressures cannot be discounted in influencing behaviors and the resulting lifestyles cannot be interpreted as evidence of moral or spiritual superiority. And these communities too are not free from different forms of corruption arising from unique pressures which those communities face. People are responsible for their response to the pressures around given the resources at their disposal.
19. Evangelization can only be fruitful when driven by charity. Charity is always capable of recognizing goodness and capabilities in the beloved and is only moved by such a vision of goodness in the beloved. There is always some good in people however wayward. This is the lesson from the mystery of the incarnation, of a God who sees good in wayward humanity. The darkness of sin is not powerful enough to completely obscure the goodness that God implanted in people. This is true even for corrupt people who will inadvertently judge themselves in their pronouncements.
Any evangelization must appreciate the good in people first and then lead them on from that good. Truth cannot be supplanted in people, not with stern warnings or threats of damnation. It lives in people and must be discovered and nurtured. This is why Jesus maintains that no one can come to the Son except if the Father draws him.
Speaking “truth” as “the premier form of charity” usurps the role of the Holy Spirit who alone lays out a path for each person to get salvation.
The Apostle not seeing any good in a people must not waste their time speaking “truth”. Such a truth is only obsessed with the purity of the law. It does not convict, it condemns. They must therefore formally express their condemnation by dusting off their shoes and proceeding to the next town (Mtt 10:14). And there will be situations where such an action will be necessary and justified.
Conclusion
20. Acts of selfless love which are the perfect expression of discipleship and participation in the life of God (Jn 4:16) are not a preserve of those in moral perfection. God does not deny those without moral perfection the necessary graces to perform such actions or the graces accruing from them. Such actions have the power to purify and strengthen the soul against domination by sin and evil and are always a victory for God.
The Church therefore in granting blessings to the wayward is doing so in conformity to the actions of God and the example of her Master who loved sinners and blessed them while on Earth. Fiduchia Supplicans is only novel in giving a name to a practice that many Pastors in charity have been doing and in including homosexual couples whose sins are perceived as uniquely disordered.
Notes
Edited to add that Fiducia Supplicans implicitly acknowledges the existence of gay relationships to make it clear and make it not necessary to raise an argument in that direction.