Cardinal Reinhard Marx, archbishop of Munich and Freising, has instructed priests and full-time pastoral staff to use a pastoral guide to bless couples who cannot or do not wish to enter into canonical marriage, including same-sex couples. Source: EWTN News.
Cardinal Marx instructed the priests and pastoral staff to introduce the controversial handout “Blessing Gives Strength to Love” as the basis of pastoral care.
Priests who do not want to carry out such blessing celebrations for homosexual marriages or remarried divorced people must refer the couples to the dean or other staff.
A letter from the cardinal, which Die Tagespost reported on Monday, indicates that the handout should be “the basis of pastoral care” and beginning in June, various offices within the archdiocese are to offer further training as to the design of the blessing celebrations for all full-time officials in pastoral care.
Cardinal Marx emphasised that “the blessing is not the celebration of a sacramental marriage”.
However, this does not mean that the blessing of a non-sacramental union, which in many cases is already a civil marriage, moves the couple to the margins of the community and the Church.
According to Die Tagespost, Cardinal Marx instructed that the “theological meaning” of the text be explained to all those “who still struggle with this blessing”.
The handout is the result of a process that emerged from a vote at the Synodal Way. In March 2023, the fifth synodal meeting adopted the text of the handout with 92 per cent of the votes.
The Joint Conference of the German Bishops’ Conference and the Central Committee of German Catholics presented the text of the handout last year.
In the Church in Germany, the handout is highly controversial.
Official recommendations were issued by the dioceses of Limburg, Osnabrück, Rottenburg-Stuttgart, and Trier. However, the Cologne Archdiocese and the dioceses of Augsburg, Eichstätt, Passau, and Regensburg all rejected the application and referred to Fiducia Supplicans for justification.
According to Fiducia Supplicans, the Vatican declaration on the pastoral meaning of blessings issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in December 2023, blessings of connections in irregular situations and of homosexual couples are possible .
Paragraph 31 of the document states that the form of the blessings may not be “ritually determined by the ecclesiastical authorities … so as not to cause confusion with the blessing of the sacrament of marriage.”
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German cardinal instructs priests to facilitate same-sex couple blessings (EWTN News)
