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Many people do not understand why the Holy Father, Pope Francis, is interested in the controversial subject of same-sex marriage. The misunderstanding seems to have deepened with his latest encyclical, Fiducia supplicans, and what it portends for the Catholic Church. Let us do a quick summary of this letter to the Church and its full meaning, and then explain his intermittent return to the difficult subject.
The word ‘fiducia’ is a latin phrase that could be interpreted as trust, faith, and confidence. Understood from the English adaptation fiduciary, it implies someone with power or obligation to act for another and does so in circumstances that require total trust, good faith and honesty. ‘Supplicans,’ understood from the English equivalent supplicant, is a person who meets God in prayer from a point of humility and need to ask for something that they required so much. We can picture such a person, for instance, flinging themselves down in a flat submissive posture to ask for the grace.
Fiducia supplicans can, therefore, be understood as someone who realizes that they have committed an error and feels the need to receive God’s blessing. Like every Christian pastor, the Catholic Priest is a fiduciary on matters of intercession and prayers between the faithful and their God. So, the question then becomes, what happens when certain groups of people, out of a realization that they need God’s mercy, come before a priest and ask for blessing?
Every Catholic understands the context of being a penitent – which they become from time to time that there is need for penance – forgiveness for sin. So, having gone through this definition, what does fiducia supplicans mean for the Church and what are priests expected to do, following the papal document?
In the document, the Pope allows Catholic Priests to bless “Catholic couples” who are who approach them out of a realization that they are in irregular situations. There are five categories of persons mentioned in the document, including cohabiting relationships, civil marriages not blessed by the Church, couples that divorced and remarried, couples in polygamous relationships, and same-sex unions. It should have been interesting for the public to see that the Catholic Church assigns the same weight to the first three relationships with same-sex marriage, which should have been a cause for pause.
The Catholic Church blesses its faithful in two ways – through the seven sacraments and spontaneous blessings, which can be conferred on anyone who approaches the priest at any place to ask for it. Ritual blessings, on the other hand, are the official blessings of the Catholic Church in seven formal situations – baptism, eucharist, confirmation, penance (reconciliation), marriage, anointing the sick, and acceptance into a holy order (for priests, nuns and others).
The document, Fiducia supplicans, makes an important discinction between the two blessing situations and focuses only on spontaneous blessings for the four types of relationships it clearly identifies. The document is clear that the formal blessings cannot be conferred on the identified relationships. However, spontaneious blessings can be offered to someone who approaches God in humility through the priest for blessings. Because such encounters between the priest and the penitent are informal, the words used in the blessing are also discretionary to the priest, unlike the formal blessings that are written down and recited by the priest in a formal ceremony of reconciliation, for instance.
Let it be understood that a human being cannot bless another human being. What priests and pastors do is to make a request to God to exercise His power on a person or thing. Only God can bless. I came across one explanatory tract that captures this beautifully:
“Only God can (bless). Typically, after praising God for His majesty and glory, Catholic blessings ask God to do one or two things. First, we ask God to dispel the evil that may be in a person or a thing. This is what happens when a priest blesses a car, or a deacon blesses and newly-purchased rice field. This is a blessing of exorcism. Second, we ask God to make a person or a thing holy. This is the blessing of sanctification. This happens when a bishop blesses the altar of a new church, or a priest blesses a newly-married couple during their wedding rite. For centuries, Catholic blessings often combined the two. An object was first exorcised before it was sanctified. Persons too are exorcised before being sanctified by the sacrament during the rite of baptism.”
Catholic blessings traditionally fulfil three obligations – to give glory to God for his gifts, to ask for favours, and to restrain the power of evil in the world. What Fiducia supplicans does is to add a fourth category of blessings – a blessing of mercy. “In other words, asking for mercy is a request for pity and for remedy” for the penitent who approaches a priest in humility and in the realization that they are in an irregular situation. Pope Francis makes it clear in the document that this blessing is for persons “who desire to entrust themselves to the Lord and his mercy, to invoke his help, and to be guided to a greater understanding of his plan of love and of truth.”
What the priests are enjoined to do is to pity the partners in irregular relationships and give them the grace of conversion so that they can regularize their relationships.
The Catholic Church is not about to confer legitimacy on people who are in cohabiting relationships, civil marriages not blessed by the Church, divorced and remarried couples, couples in polygamous relationships, and and same-sex unions.
