To bless or not to bless?

Priest Anton Ziolkovsky explained in the introduction what blessing means according to the Catholic Church and who can receive it.

“A blessing is understood as a sacrament, that is, it is the invocation of God’s favor on a person or a situation, and it must be said that anyone can receive it,” Ziolkovsky said, adding that what is required of a person for a blessing is a basic openness to what we call the transcendent, i.e., to God.

A person is always in some moral situation, but this is not completely decisive in whether or not he can receive the blessing, added the parish priest in the subtropical village of Nová Lesná.

Ziolkovsky also pointed out that just as in the case of prayer we say that it should lead to the sacramental life, so “the sacraments should also lead to the sacramental life.”

Many people do not perceive the validity of the controversy surrounding the document Fiducia supplicans, since after each Mass all those present in the church receive a blessing.

“The point and the idea of the blessing is that what is blessed should be by God’s plan and God’s will, and then there is no problem,” responded philosopher and president of the Ladislav Hanus Society, Juraj Šúst.

According to him, the Church is pleased and willing to bless sinners who, however, have the goodwill to purify themselves and direct themselves on the path of the Gospel.

Anton Ziolkovsky noted that the document Fiducia supplicans is specific in that it speaks of the non-liturgical blessing of couples who are in irreligious situations, or same-sex couples.

“With blessings in general, if I go to a rally in the square and I would give a blessing to everybody, of course, the effect of that blessing depends on how internally disposed and open people are to it,” Priest Ziolkovsky said.

The problem with blessing couples of persons with homosexual tendencies, according to Juraj Šúst, is that it is assumed that the relationship of two people is being blessed, but they do not live a pure sexual life, which, according to the Church’s teaching and natural reason, is only possible in a marriage between a man and a woman.

A case of such blessings would not be likened to some corrupt businessman, but rather to a situation where, for example, a cartel would be blessed.

“We probably shouldn’t do that, but, of course, individual sinners have always been blessed and can be blessed by the Church; it presupposes an openness to reform, to repent,” Shust stressed.

Priest Karol Moravcik sees the origin of the uproar over Fiducia supplicans in the Vatican dicastery’s intention, with the Pope’s signature, to bless these couples who, according to the norms of the Church, do not live a regular way of life. “Although some would say that only the Lord God knows,” Moravcik said.

Moravcik, a parish priest in Borinka near Bratislava, pointed out that in the past people married in different ways, for example, by parental agreement or for property. “There was a lot of sin and pain, even in these regular marriages, but culture and society have changed,” he concluded.

“Many people today live in couples and are not married, plus homosexual couples are mentioned more and more often, and a mood has developed in society that pities them and sympathizes with them, tries to understand them – all this has some reflection in the Church as well,” Karol Moravcik continued, adding that he does not consider the blessing of couples to be a complete novelty.

He pointed out that in Cardinal Victor Fernández’s response to the so-called dubia of the five cardinals of last September, signed by Pope Francis, “everything was said in a nutshell that is in the Fiducia, that is, that the Church has a clear understanding of marriage, that we should avoid holding rituals that would imitate the celebration of marriage where marriage is not the issue, but it is written that we must not lose pastoral charity in our relationship with people.”

Karol Moravcik emphasized the sentence that “the defense of objective truth is not to be the only expression of this pastoral love, because it is also to consist of charity, patience, understanding, kindness, and encouragement; we cannot be judges who only deny, reject and exclude…”

“When someone asks for a blessing, he is expressing a request for help from God, a request to be able to live a better life of trust in the Father,” he added.

For such people to come and ask for a blessing at all, presupposes some relationships, friendships, helpfulness, and understanding, Fr. Moravcik thought.

As an example, he cited the situation when in such a context, for example, a priest is invited to visit, something is celebrated, children and grandchildren are introduced to him, and among them, there are those who, despite their life situation, have remained in some type of relationship with the Church and ask for a blessing. “These are not some brash, eyeless people who would brag about their sins and ask for approval. I’ve never experienced that in my long life,” Moravcik said.

According to Anton Ziolkovsky, the question is not whether we agree or disagree with the blessing of irreligious couples, because we must understand the nature of the document Fiducia supplicans, which is, from a purely formal point of view, a document of the ordinary magisterium.

“It is a manifestation of the teaching office which is binding – not infallible, but binding. This means that in this sense there must be a normal respect for the document,” Ziolkovsky said.

He went on to say that the statements of the popes or the offices of the Roman Curia seem to be in a process of “verification,” or in theological terminology, reception. “This means that the life of the Church subsequently verifies whether or not what has been produced is accepted within the Church,” the former secretary of the CCC added.

According to Ziolkovsky, there is no need to create panic or hysteria from this document, although it is a solution that “is new for us, we must respect that it is a decision of the dicastery with the approval of the Pope, so it has a certain gravity, and it makes us think whether the arguments that are used are relevant or not, and then, of course, the future will show to what extent it is right,” he said.

Priest Ziolkovsky sees in Pope Francis a long-standing effort to give signals of openness and welcome to all people on the ecclesial community’s peripheries. “In my opinion, he is not concerned with anything other than simple expressions of humanity and acceptance,” Ziolkovsky mused.

Although we can, in his opinion, argue about whether the instruments the Pope chooses are appropriate or not, we have to admit that we have reserves in this area. “We owe these people a lot – in the human sense and the question of acceptance,” he added.

Ziolkovsky sees as a second, subsequent motive that this document is meant to be a kind of barrier that the Pope has erected to the Church in Germany. “The Church there is much more progressive in this, mentally they have been elsewhere for a long time, but this document has set a boundary for them that we can still imagine this and this again we can’t,” he added.

Blessing as approval?
Juraj Šúst agrees that it is necessary to maintain respect and reverence and to have the will to accept the magisterium, even if it is sometimes difficult, according to him, “but at the same time this quality must be complemented, as it were, by an effort of honest reasoning and justification”.

“It seems to me that if we compare the document of the dicastery of 2021 – that is the so-called note or response, which answers ‘no’ to the question of whether it is possible to bless couples of persons with homosexual inclinations – with this declaration of Fiducia supplicants, we must see a certain tension, even contradiction,” Šúst said.

According to him, the contradiction lies in the fact that when blessing same-sex couples, it is almost impossible to avoid the impression that by blessing them we are endorsing this lifestyle.

“The document explicitly says that this is not the purpose of the blessing, that it does not change the teaching on marriage, but the symbols have their language regardless of the intentions we have when we offer those symbols,” Juraj Šúst recounted, giving an example:

“If I gave a red rose to a colleague with whom I had, say, spent some interesting conversations over coffee before, I might have the intention that it was just a thank you for good cooperation, but in our culture, this symbol has certain romantic connotations,” he said.

Similarly, he said, it’s true of blessing, which involves calling something good to the object of the blessing itself. “But if it’s a relationship that’s unestablished, then there’s confusion. And that is why there is so much resistance in the church to this latest document,” he said.

Juraj Šúst went on to talk about how it is good pastorally to show that we accept people who are not living in a sacramental marriage, that we take the time to go and talk to them, or that we work with them on many good projects. “But part of that approach has to be that we don’t abandon the truth of how we are to live,” he opined.

“If in a situation like that we were to say to those people, but it’s okay that you’re not married, but otherwise you’re good people, you’re against corruption, you pay your taxes, in some ways that would not be a demonstration of pastoral love from my point of view, but perhaps even in some ways a certain indifference, because in this way we can reassure people that times have changed and that along with the secularization of culture and society, the Church must also necessarily secularize,” said the president of the Ladislav Hanus Community.

Karol Moravcik responded that the Church is learning and that when under the previous Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ladaria, they rejected blessings, they meant ritual blessings, i.e. quasi-gay marriages. “Now there is a differentiation of blessings, it is not a contradiction, there is a shift,” said the priest of the Archdiocese of Bratislava.

Discussants also commented on whether the talk is about blessing individuals or couples in the sense of the couple as such. In other words, in this context, whether there are two blessings or one blessing and how they perceive the pastoral guidelines of the Slovak Bishops’ Conference.

“It is clear from the position of the KBS that when two persons who form a couple come and ask for a blessing, the meaning of the blessing is to be explained to them; if they do not accept the explanation, the blessing is to be refused,” said Anton Ziolkovsky, saying that in the case of a blessing, a sign of blessing is to be made over the individuals. “It is not the couple as a whole that is blessed, but the individuals,” he concluded.

“I would not worry about such theorizing, rather about the fact that it is not so common for people to come and ask for blessings in these situations,” responded Karol Moravcik to a question.

He went on to talk about his experience when people who seemed to be completely on the periphery of the Church, after years, stood on their feet and began to live according to the Church’s norms as well. However, according to him, this will not happen if an atmosphere of acceptance is not created for these people if they do not feel that something important is happening in the Church.

Priest Ziolkovsky admitted that the Fiducia Supplicans document, by the terminology it adopts and how it explains it, “comes across as relatively vague.”

“It has to be said that even the non-liturgical blessing of couples looks de facto like a simulation of the blessing that happens at the celebration of marriage, this is the root of the whole problem, which is why all the consternation has arisen,” he noted.

“I even think that this document is in a sense a prefiguration of Francis’ pontificate,” he said, adding that he doesn’t know if we have any similar document, apart from Humanae Vitae from the 1960s, that has been so massively disapproved internally by the Church.

Ziolkovsky pointed out that Cardinal Fernández had issued an interpretative note as early as January and, amid much opposition, had to interpret the document and narrow the rules. Then Africa stepped in when the President of the African Bishops’ Conferences declared that they would not accept the Fiducia Supplicans and, together with Cardinal Fernández, drew up a letter that meant that Africa would not apply it at all.

According to Ziolkovsky, the mistake may have been that the document did not go through an internal comment process. “Because if they had asked the bishops’ conferences beforehand what they thought about it, it might have turned out very differently. Or if they had applied the principle of synodality, which is now in circulation, but this thing seems to have gone its way, and you can see that a lot of people were left in a quandary about it,” he concluded.