VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis has effectively told clergy that they can decide for themselves whether to “bless” homosexual unions.
Responding to a dubia question submitted by five cardinals, as to whether or not the Church can ever accept as a “possible good” objectively sinful situations, such as same-sex unions, Pope Francis stated that “pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are forms of blessing, requested by one or more persons, that do not transmit a mistaken conception of marriage.”
On October 2 five cardinals made public a series of letters which they have sent to Pope Francis, expressing serious doubts and concerns about the Synod on Synodality and recent papal comments.
The signatories of the dubia are: Cardinals Walter Brandmüller, former prefect of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences; Raymond Leo Burke, former prefect of the Apostolic Signatura; Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, former Archbishop of Guadalajara; Robert Sarah, the former prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments; and Joseph Zen, the former bishop of Hong Kong.
The five cardinals had written to the Pope on July 10, and received a reply from him on July 13, in a letter dated July 11.
BREAKING: @Pontifex to clergy: Decide for yourselves whether to bless homosexual unions
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— LifeSiteNews (@LifeSite) October 2, 2023
It was in the July 11 letter that the Pope responded to the five concerns made by the cardinals: namely on possible attacks on the Church’s doctrines, the possibility of homosexual “blessings,” the weight of teaching afforded to the Synod, female ordination, and the necessity of repentance in sacramental Confession.
So “vague” was the Pope’s letter, that the five cardinals wrote to him again on August 21, but this time received no reply.
Regarding same-sex “blessings,” the cardinals wrote in their July 10 letter:
According to Divine Revelation, confirmed in Sacred Scripture, which the Church “at the divine command with the help of the Holy Spirit,…listens to devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully” (Dei Verbum 10): “In the beginning” God created man in his own image, male and female he created them and blessed them, that they might be fruitful (cf. Gen. 1, 27-28), whereby the Apostle Paul teaches that to deny sexual difference is the consequence of the denial of the Creator (Rom 1, 24-32).
It is asked: Can the Church derogate from this “principle,” considering it, contrary to what Veritatis Splendor 103 taught, as a mere ideal, and accepting as a “possible good” objectively sinful situations, such as same-sex unions, without betraying revealed doctrine? [Emphasis original]
The letter they received from Francis was seven pages in total, with a page and a half given to responding to the issue of same-sex “blessings.”
