ROME — The Vatican doc explicitly saying Catholic monks can bless same-sex unions lays out the circumstances for what such blessings can, and can’t, contain.
The general aim is to make it abundantly clear to the couple and people round them that the blessing will not be a liturgical or sacramental ritual, and that it by no means resembles a wedding. It is because the Catholic Church teaches that marriage is a lifelong sacramental union between a person and lady.
Nothing has modified concerning the church’s place on marriage, its agency opposition to homosexual marriage, or its perception that any extramarital intercourse — homosexual or straight — is sinful.
Listed here are among the factors within the doc:
— To keep away from any confusion that the church was performing a same-sex marriage, the blessing shouldn’t be provided along with a civil union ceremony, homosexual or straight.
— “Nor can or not it’s carried out with any clothes, gestures, or phrases which might be correct to a marriage.”
— Such blessings could be provided throughout a go to to a Catholic shrine, throughout a gathering with a priest, a prayer recited in a gaggle or throughout a pilgrimage.
— The blessing shouldn’t be codified or in any means established by set procedures or rituals by dioceses or bishops’ conferences. Reasonably, monks ought to be skilled to “spontaneously” supply blessings exterior the church’s set of authorized blessings.
— To drive that time dwelling, the doc concludes that the Vatican has no plans to manage particulars or practicalities about same-sex blessings, or reply to additional questions on them, leaving it to particular person monks to work out.