Advent and commitments and unions and blessings and marriage
Sometimes the Church’s movement resembles that of a boomerang or an accordion.
Advent is coming to a close, and the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith draws us to the words of Pope Francis:
“The supplicating trust of the faithful People of God receives the gift of blessing that flows from the Heart of Christ through his Church. Pope Francis offers this timely reminder: ‘The great blessing of God is Jesus Christ. He is the great gift of God, his own Son. He is a blessing for all humanity, a blessing that has saved us all. He is the Eternal Word, with whom the Father blessed us ‘while we were still sinners’ (Rom. 5:8), as St. Paul says. He is the Word made flesh, offered for us on the cross.’”
These words come in the newly-released Declaration Fiducia Supplicans, “On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings.” My own Arcbishop, Archbishop Bernard Hebda of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, provided a statement on this Declaration, situating it within the context of Advent:
“In these last days of Advent, we are reminded of the amazing love that prompted God the Son to take on human flesh. While the Child Jesus found exceptional welcome, love and support from Mary and Joseph, we cannot deny that he was born at a time and place that epitomized the very messiness of human life. In the course of his public ministry, Jesus was surrounded more often not by saints but by those who struggled with sin, by those who did not always respond to God’s plan for their lives. Jesus came into their world and loved them…indeed loved us.
“Today’s declaration from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) on the topic of blessings is well situated in that Advent reality. The statement, approved by Pope Francis, reminds us that all of us are loved by God, and that we all are in need of God’s mercy and would benefit from his blessing as we strive to live out his call more perfectly.”
As we close out Advent, we can take this time to reflect on the coming of God and the histories of our own lives and the weirdness of the Church.
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I’ll never forget the day I told my coworkers I was planning on having a commitment ceremony.
One asked in response, “So when’s the wedding?” For them, our “commitment” became an “engagement,” and the “ceremony” became a “marriage,” even though I had never used those latter terms.
I’ve had a few responses to this since. One has been to leverage the increasingly important role of DEI in corporate America, saying something along the lines of: “Different people have different views of marriage and commitment, and when they give you language for how they’d describe their own relationships, you should use that language as well when speaking with or about them.” As I continue to push for more inclusion in my professional work when it comes to religion, I think this will be a key challenge: learning openness to the language some use to describe themselves, even if we may disagree with it personally. Here, the challenge is similar to those who may disagree with trans or nonbinary identities.
Looking back, it’s also become clear to me how the Church might benefit from encouraging formal commitments of same-sex couples, framed in language other than “marriage.” My coworkers had already dismissed “the Church’s views on marriage.” But they would be open to mine. And discussing the significance of a “commitment ceremony” and the choice for that particular kind of union could be a pathway for broader reimagining on their part. The commitment ceremony might be an opportunity to provide creative openings to the tradition of the Church.
But I didn’t make it that far.
I’ve had to learn that the purpose of my life isn’t to teach other people lessons. I was made for more than that, and so were the people who love me.
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On December 18, the DDF released that Declaration, Fiducia Supplicans. It was the latest in a series of weird developments when it comes to Catholic treatment of those who may be attracted to the same sex, from the medieval positive accounts of same-sex desire to the awkward influence of ex-gay ideology on 20th-century encyclicals and instructions to the 2021 CDF acknowledgement of “positive elements” in same-sex unions. Catholic development isn’t really linear. It’s weird. Sometimes the Church’s movement resembles that of a boomerang or an accordion.
Fiducia Supplicans opens by focusing on a “broadening and enrichment of the classical understanding of blessings.” It is not meant to be business as usual, but characterizes itself as “innovative” in a way that “implies a real development.” The declaration states: “It is precisely in this context that one can understand the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage” (emphasis added).
These opening paragraphs provide a challenge to what some have said about the document, that “it doesn’t really change anything,” that “it focuses on blessing individuals,” and that it represents a shift in Church teaching on marriage. The Declaration explicitly states that it does change things, that couples are the subjects of the blessings it contemplates, and that, while it does change things, it doesn’t change Church teaching on marriage “in any way.”
Much has been made of it. But Flora Tang and Jason Steidl Jack have insightfully noted that, in practice, Fiducia Supplicans may not change much for LGBTQ+ people in the Church. Time will tell.
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Marriage was thoroughly off the table for me, for a variety of reasons. I now regret that. I’d thought that, by seeking to uphold Church teaching and explicitly resisting public appearances of being in a marriage or seeking a marriage, I might be able to carve out a place for myself in the Church. I’d thought that I could find acceptance. I’d thought that this difficult thing, this misunderstood thing, this painful thing, could find safety and support. I was wrong.
The less painful thing would have been to look at all these expectations that all these Catholics had put on me and say, “Fuck it.” But that’s not what I did.
I suffered for that. Everyone around me suffered for that.
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Fiducia Supplicans takes special care to distinguish "simple blessing[s]” from sacraments and from special liturgical rites, especially those for marriage. It warns against a reductive approach to blessings, which would require the “same moral conditions” for reception as those required for sacraments. And it precludes the Church from conferring a “liturgical blessing when that would somehow offer a form of moral legitimacy to a union that presumes to be a marriage or to an extra-marital sexual practice.” So Fiducia Supplicans marks important distinctions, while also calling to “broaden this perspective.” If we subject pastoral gestures to “too many moral prerequisites,” this “could overshadow the unconditional power of God’s love that forms the basis for the gesture of blessing.”
Priests, in particular, should be wary of such prerequisites, keeping in mind the great power God grants to them, despite their many moral failings. As Francis of Assisi writes, “We must… show respect for the clergy, not so much for them personally if they are sinners, but by reason of their office and their administration of the most holy Body and Blood of Christ which they sacrifice upon the altar and receive and administer to others.”
This perspective can be especially helpful after the clergy abuse crisis, which should also elicit humility when it comes to moralizing by clergy. One would think that a Church rife with abuse might be able to operate with fine distinctions, holding alongside each other both moral failings and the work of the Church. The lack of humility on the part of many clergy in responding to Fiducia Supplicans and the claims they make regarding its subjects demonstrate shallow reflection when it comes to the clergy abuse crisis.
Fiducia Supplicans is meant to be an act of grace and humility in a Church rife with sin.
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“What are you writing about?” one of my family members asks me. It’s years after that commitment, and its ending. It’s Christmas Eve. I’m at my parents’ house. This is happening right now.
“Ohhhh, the Church,” I say. I’m in the zone, and I also don’t want to necessarily have this live conversation, right now.
“What about the Church?” they ask.
“Ohhhhh… about Catholic drama. And sex,” I say. I’m avoiding the subject.
“You have a problem,” they say. They laugh. I laugh. It feels good to be here.
So much of this stuff feels like my past. It doesn’t haunt my present the same way it used to.
Some married friends visited family that doesn’t approve of their relationship. They sent me a selfie of them in bed, under a sign that says “blessed.” It makes us laugh. But we feel it. I believe in a God of irony. God comes down to us with His grace, and I am relearning to return thanksgiving.
Fiducia Supplicans writes of blessings in both the Old and New Testament: “We find the divine gift that ‘descends,’ the human thanksgiving that ‘ascends,’ and the blessing imparted by man that ‘extends’ toward others.”
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Responding to Fiducia Supplicans, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia wrote in First Things about “The Cost of ‘Making a Mess.’” Chaput has a way of incensing my LGBTQ+ Catholic friends, both liberal and conservative. I’ve personally come to enjoy his writing. He tends to write in absolutes, in the style of an apologist rather than a philosopher, which sometimes leads to entertainingly false conclusions. He shows great prowess in proof-texting and plays the part of the defender of “the tradition,” while drawing very minimally from its actual texts. (The only text from the Christian tradition he cites in this piece is a single verse from the Bible… which he repeats at the end for emphasis.) And he often betrays himself in ways that are actually quite illuminating.
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As I write this, I laugh to myself, and one of my family members is saying, “Chris, are you being nice?”
My mother laughs.
That family member goes, “He’s laughing while typing. That’s not a good sign.”
I laugh again. Lately I’ve done a lot more chuckling while writing. I think I’m clever. Not everyone agrees. And that’s kind of funny too.
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Chaput writes: “Deliberate or persistent ambiguity—anything that fuels misunderstanding or seems to leave an opening for objectively sinful behavior—is not of God.”
I ask myself, “Has this guy ever read the Gospels?”
One of Jesus’s key characteristics is that he constantly confuses people around him, especially his followers. When he’s being questioned by the Sanhedrin, it’s a fair reading to see Jesus as goading them on with obnoxious and bizarre responses that mean nothing to the people in the room with him. We like to read the Gospels as outsiders, treating ourselves as God, knowing better than everyone else in the text, because we are familiar with the story. But when we really start to read the Gospels for what they are—stories about a life, stories that can unfold as new each time and within which we can situate ourselves in many ways—we start to see Jesus as a confusing bizarre weirdo. And that can become one of the ways in which we really come to love him.
Despite what Chaput writes, “deliberate or persistent ambiguity” seems to have been a favorite speaking style of… God.
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I was re-taught to read Scripture by a young Orthodox man with whom I had fallen in love for a time. I came to love the Gospels with a depth I couldn’t have imagined before.
I learned to accept, among other things, ambiguity. A mark of both psychological and moral maturity is the ability to operate within ambiguity, including moral ambiguity. This is necessary as a member of a Church where even the “official understanding” of “sexuality” is ambiguous. When we refuse ambiguity in the Church, we end up refusing the person of Christ.
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Perhaps Chaput’s views come from a perspective arising on all ideological sides: that doctrinal developments occur like moves in a game of chess. They are concerned over every hint of change, which is either consistent with or contrary to our ecclesial aims.
In contrast, I tend to side with John Henry Newman and Hannah Arendt. I believe that living ideas (like doctrine) develop through mysterious manifestations at the center of constellations of people and events and other ideas, in ways we only partially understand in retrospect. Doctrinal development does not take “sides.” It does what it does, and we don’t entirely know why or how.
Nowhere is Chaput’s ideology clearer than in his discussion of those who are a key focus of Fiducia Supplicans: “couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples.” Chaput criticizes the Declaration, saying:
“Relationships that the Church has always seen as sinful are now often described as ‘irregular.’ This neuters the reality of morally defective behavior and leads to confusion about what we can and can’t call ‘sin.’”
This is the response of someone practicing small-heartedness. He is so preoccupied with the sinfulness of others that he can’t imagine faithfulness in irregularity. Consider celibate partners, or coparents who are not married and have no romantic or sexual relationship but nonetheless want to be blessed as parents to their children. The Declaration makes space for them, but Chaput does not, unless we qualify them with “sinfulness.”
Sure, the number of such people may be relatively small. But I see from Chaput what I see from Catholic leaders time and again: they are so preoccupied with condemning committed sinners that they lump the tired faithful in with them, and then toss everyone aside. This brings to mind the many children born outside of the context of marriage who have been cast aside as the “products of sin.” I today don’t characterize myself as one of those “tired faithful,” but I still worry about them and wish the best for them and will do my best to support and defend them.
There are many connections to be made between the Church’s treatment of LGBTQ+ people and the Church’s treatment of unwed mothers (more on that in the coming year), but I’ll touch on just one connecting theme: scandal.
Many have argued that Fiducia Supplicans will become a source of scandal, confusing people on the nature of marriage and opening the door to obstinate disagreement with Church teaching. For those of you who are worried that this will happen, my question is: where have you been?
This is so widespread and manifest as to be hardly worth caring about. I’m not confident Fiducia Supplicans will make much of a difference. Mending that state of affairs will require much more than doubling down on doctrine. Few have done such excellent work damaging Catholics’ understanding of and commitment to “Church teaching” on marriage and sexuality as its apologists. A very different kind of work will need to be done in this area.
Ironically, the defenders of the “Catholic understanding of marriage” undermine the Catholic understanding of “scandal” when they raise it as a concern here. I’ve written a bit on this elsewhere, so I’ll just say here that Aquinas argues that we may conceal or defer some spiritual goods when scandal would arise from weakness or ignorance, though the scandal can cease by being explained or abated. Which is exactly what Fiducia Supplicans does. Now, whether priests repeat that explanation or otherwise abate scandal in their implementation of the guidance in Fiducia Supplicans is up to them. But it always has been. (If there was an “orthodox Catholic” critique to be made of Father Jame’s Martin’s recent public posts, that’s the one.)
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I’ll write just a bit about division. Some have argued that Fiducia Supplicans is driving division in the Church, and that the Church should be about unity. In doing so, these critics actually betray themselves. One will find in the actual text of Fiducia Supplicans a remarkable continuity with the Church’s longstanding official teachings on sexuality and marriage (the issues at the center of this controversy). Those actually seeking unity in the Church will highlight that continuity, and use their authority and influence to wrap their arms around this document as they bring all of Creation into the fold of the Church. This can be done, if one chooses to do it.
But those who insist that the document is a new source of division are actually fueling division with that insistence. They create and embolden sources of division. It’s important to note that the critiques of Fiducia Supplicans haven’t focused on substantive problems with the text. Instead, they’ve focused on what may be implied by it. Because that’s all they have. They turn doctrinal developments into that game of chess. They are playing mimetic games, doing the things they criticize, fueling the games they love to hate. I get it. I’ve played that game. It’s a fun and exciting game. But it’s also death.
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My family is telling me it’s time for some family tennis. I’m very bad at tennis, so I’m sort of using this writing time as an excuse to avoid it. I have to ask myself, “Is this piece really about Fiducia Supplicans, or is it about avoiding tennis, or both?” Especially when it comes to these topics, is what we’re writing about ever really what we’re writing about?
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We are almost at the end of the best liturgical season of the year. I’m feeling hopeful.
But not because of Fiducia Supplicans. Its release didn’t do much for me. A lot of the last year (past few years, really) has been working on letting go of the need to ask Church leaders for permission: permission to not be miserable, permission to do what I need to do to get out of vicious cycles, permission to see reality for what it is, permission to acknowledge the things I feel. I’m very much a work in progress. But I’m very proud of how far I’ve come. I hope you all feel that for yourselves.
Fiducia Supplicans isn’t the source of the hope that I’m feeling. But its release did coincide with my own season of hope. I choose to believe that grace is mysterious, that the acts of God come as a sign of contradiction, that I do not need to understand God’s love to believe in it, that others do not need to understand my love for it to be good and true and beautiful.
A very blessed end of Advent to you all. May you find unexpected and unplanned and contradictory and confusing and weird and wonderful joys in the new year.
Time for tennis. Sorry for the typos! (May update later)
