A big change.
They’ve been blessing animals for 1,000 years and finally had the compassion to bless people as well. It’s a move in the right direction but they’re a bunch of bigots.
Like the Pope knows what marriage looks like.
Hell, catholic bikers can get their motorcycles blessed.
A creative gay couple would just stand near a priest and sneeze.
Well, I’ve always considered using the term “marriage” to be a poor idea because it has a ton of traditional religious/church connotations to it for the chief reason that, up until recent times, that is what it has always been. It appears the Pope is ready to bless a civil union between same sex couples but not something that smacks of traditional marriage.
If I married a woman, that would be fine with me because what I would want is all the civil benefits of being married. I wouldn’t give a rats ass about anything else.
I’m curious what would constitute a relationship or ceremony that “doesn’t resemble marriage”, because that’s potentially a loophole you could drive a truck through. You could have a big ceremony where a gay couple invite all of their family and friends, and promise to love and care for each other forever, and all the rest, and still argue “Well, it doesn’t resemble a marriage because they’re the same sex”, and therefore their marriage-in-the-eyes-of-all-but-the-Church would still be eligible for this blessing.
A priest will bless most anything if you ask, so long as it’s not something that’s inherently sinful. And that includes blessing people. Prior to this decision, if a gay man had come up to a priest and asked “Please bless my husband, who’s suffering from cancer”, for instance, that wouldn’t have been a problem for any but the most jerkish of priests. What’s new here isn’t that they’re blessing people, but that they’re blessing the relationship.
For loose values of “always”. For the first few centuries, the Christian Church was basically uninvolved in marriage.
Fortunately, it’s not an issue I’ll ever have to worry about as a member of the ELCA because we honor ALL marriages and have a liturgy that is worded to be totally inclusive of all LBGTQ+ couples.
I think a better way to describe this is “doesn’t resemble a wedding” rather than “doesn’t resemble marriage”. Because any same sex relationship where the people involved are seeking a blessing is going to “resemble” a marriage , even if it is not legally one. But what Pope seems to be saying is that there is not to be a set ritual that could be confused with the Rite of Marriage. It wouldn’t prohibit inviting family and friends , it wouldn’t prohibit having a big party . IMO , it would prohibit a ceremony in a church with vows and witnesses and possibly white wedding dresses. But that doesn’t mean the vows/witnesses/dress couldn’t happen at a legal ceremony, which in many countries is always separate from a religious ceremony.
That’s not the case. The new decree or whatever the Church calls such a paper explicitly states that such a blessing may not be made in any way in connection to a civil union.
So then, why should I be excited about his “magnanimous gesture”? He should just keep quiet.
Because it’s a move in the right direction. And with the Church, any change in the right direction, no matter how small, is progress. You don’t have to happy with where they are to recognize that.
When it comes to changing direction, compared to the Roman Catholic Church, oil tankers are doing donuts out in the ocean.
I think I expressed that a little ambiguously when I wrote “such a blessing may not be made in any way in connection to a civil union.” This doesn’t mean that gay couples who are in a civil union may not be blessed, but only that a blessing by the Church may not occur to accompany or confirm the administrative act of a civil union, at least that’s how I interpreted it (I read the news on the German edition of the official Vatican website). Where I live, it used to be common that couples got legally married in the morning at the town hall (it’s obligatory for a valid marriage, a mere religious ceremony like in the USA doesn’t count) and have the Church ceremony on the same day in the afternoon. This is a scenario that the Church wants to exclude for blessings of gay couples. IMHO, that’s only to give the hardliners and conservatives a bone, but they will be livid anyway.
Ah, I guess that’s something. There are actually still millions of traditional Roman Catholic members of his church. He’s being careful not to alienate them.
This is, I think, important for critics of the Church to remember. The Pope could issue a Papal Bull tomorrow saying that gays can marry, and abortion is no problem, and birth control is encouraged, and women can be priests. But if he did so, the result wouldn’t be that the Roman Catholic Church would accept all of those things. The result would be a schism in the Church, with all of the people who believed those things already continuing to believe them, and the rest of the Church declaring Francis a heretic and declaring someone else Pope. Almost nobody would actually follow the Pope in that decision.
In an institution with as much inertia as the Church, slow change is the only kind of change.
True - I think if we look at other churches that already accept SSM, the path they navigated typically had more than one step or stage to it. Heck, even governments that officiate marriages sometimes had to take more than one bite at the cherry; here in the UK, officially recognised ‘civil partnerships’ preceded official recognition of something that was allowed to be called ‘Marriage’ (and allowed to have all of the same rights and benefits) between partners of the same sex.
It’s frustrating when things that are fair and right don’t just happen all at once, but it seems to be the way that change most typically occurs; something softens the ice; something else breaks through it.
No, it was (relatively) uninvolved in weddings. It always considered marriage a big deal, divinely ordained and invested with considerable theological significance. As did, before that, the Jewish tradition from which Christianity emerged.
As a member of an ELCA church myself, that’s true now, but it wasn’t in the not so distant (2005) past. Heck, when I was a member of the United Church of Christ 30 years ago, even they fell back to a “ceremony of commitment” rather a religious marriage ceremony.
I consider the RCC being only 20-30 years behind mainline Protestant denominations regarding gay unions to be almost earth-shattering.
And the Church of England is still not unanimous about how far to go in terms of blessings and the like (and somewhat behind both the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and the Scottish Episcopal Church).