Greg Daly
German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich, blesses Catholics before a Sunday mass at St. Joseph Cathedral in Hanoi during his a long week visit to Vietnam. Could the Church consider blessings for some same-sex unions, asks Greg Daly
“Cardinal Marx endorses blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples,” declared America’s Catholic News Agency (CNA) earlier this month, with a host of other Catholic news sites taking a similar line and with predictable fits of the vapours across the Catholic internet.
Interviewed by Bavaria’s State Broadcasting Service, Munich’s Cardinal Reinhard Marx, the president of Germany’s bishops’ conference and a member of Pope Francis’ Council of Cardinal Advisers, had been asked about the Church’s failure to “move forward” with regard to, for instance, the blessing of homosexual couples.
He responded by saying there is a question around how the Church can meet challenges posed by new insights and new circumstances in modern life, and that it must be pastorally close to gay people who want and need pastoral accompaniment.
“An entirely different question is how this is to be done publicly and liturgically,” he continued, saying these things need to be handled carefully and reflected on.
Solutions
The interviewer, Karin Wendlinger, responded by asking whether he could imagine a way to bless homosexual couples in the Church, and he answered, the CNA reported, “Yes, however, there are no general solutions. That would not be right, I think.”
The Cardinal had, in fact, not said this at all, as anybody who knew German and listened to the recordings of the interview freely available online could have pointed out.
His answer had in fact began “es gibt”, meaning, ‘there is’. It was perhaps possible to discern a fluid “ja” – ‘yes’ – just before this, but without the crucial qualifier ‘aber’, meaning ‘but’ or ‘however’, this would have simply been a verbal nod of affirmation to indicate that he had understood the question.
Small wonder, then, that the German bishops’ conference had the CNA correct its story and publish the following more accurate translation of the cardinal’s response: “There are no general solutions and I think that would not be right, because we are talking about pastoral care for individual cases, and that applies to other areas as well, which we cannot regulate, where we have no sets of rules.”
It is hard to believe that bad German translations should have again set the Catholic internet aflame scarcely half a year after Pope Emeritus Benedict was wrongly reported on numerous sites as having sent a message to be read at Cardinal Joachim Meisner’s funeral that declared the Church to be on the verge of capsizing.
Given the prominence in the Church of such prelates as Cardinals Marx, Walter Kasper, Gerhard Müller and Christoph Schönborn, not to mention the Pope Emeritus himself and Archbishop Georg Gänswein, one would think that facility in German should be more highly valued in Church journalism.
In its absence, however, and while the CNA has changed its headline to state that the cardinal “discusses” blessings for same-sex couples, the Catholic internet and media are left littered with a legion of headlines that can only be described as, to use the phrase of the day, ‘fake news’. And, of course, more mainstream news outlets have uncritically followed suit.
At the same time, Irish Catholics may recall how speaking in Dublin in June 2016 the cardinal reiterated a view he had expressed at 2014’s Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family that: “You cannot say that a long-term relationship between a man and a man, who are faithful, is nothing. That it has no worth.”
The cardinal, in a Trinity College lecture entitled ‘The Church and the Challenge of Freedom’, had said that society needed to create structures to respect the rights of same-sex couples, and said that the Church should not oppose this – although he stressed that marriage is something different.
A similar point was made in 2015 by Vienna’s Cardinal Schönborn, the lead author under St John Paul II and the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of the Cathechism of the Catholic Church.
Interview by Fr Antonio Spadaro, editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, the cardinal spoke of a gay friend of his who was in a stable relationship, after many temporary ones.
“It’s an improvement,” he said, pointing out that they share “a life, they share their joys and sufferings, they help one another. It must be recognised that this person took an important step for his own good and the good of others, even though it certainly is not a situation the Church can consider ‘regular’.”
While maintaining the necessity of the Church’s teaching on homosexual acts, the cardinal pointed out that a new stability is clearly a step in the right direction, and something that the Church could and should encourage as a way of helping people move gradually closer to a position in line with Church teaching.
Assumption
Could the Church support such stable relationships, seeing them, to borrow a concept from Pope Benedict’s 2010 book-length interview Light of the World, as “a first step in the direction of a moralisation, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants”.
For Philadephia’s Archbishop Charles Chaput, the answer appears to be ‘no’. In a blogpost written in the aftermath of the first reports on Cardinal Marx’s comments, Dr Chaput said such proposals might sound generous and reasonable, but would be deeply imprudent.
Blessing rites for same-sex relationships, he said, would entail cooperation in morally forbidden acts, undermining and confusing the Catholic witness on the nature of marriage. Maintaining that all people – which “emphatically includes people people with same-sex attraction” – are entitled to respect as children of God, he nonetheless cautions that “seemingly merciful” blessings could encourage people in a course of action that could lead them away from God.
It’s a powerful riposte, though one that invites questions about how, for instance, marriages are regularly celebrated for couples who will use contraception. Even if the numbers doing this are nowhere near the 98% often claimed, it could surely be argued that in blessing such marriages, the Church is tacitly encouraging people in courses of action that could likewise lead them away from God.
It may be time to revisit with suitably critical eyes John Boswell’s Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe which, claiming that the Church had once blessed homosexual unions, met with predictable media adulation on its 1994 publication, only to be dismantled with scholarly precision in subsequent years.
Misunderstood or misrepresented by Prof. Boswell, ceremonies blessing same-sex pairs of friends were common in the Orthodox Church even in medieval times, and are not unknown now.
These adelphopoiesis ceremonies were adoption rituals, making two men brothers, or two women sisters, and although Boswell’s claim that these functioned as covertly-sanctioned homosexual marriages does not bear much scrutiny, there is surely something to be said for the Church considering such templates for blessing two people of the same sex who are determined to commit themselves to each other’s wellbeing.
The Church expects Catholics who have divorced and civilly remarried to endeavour to live together as brother as sister. Is there perhaps scope for it to consider blessing same-sex couples who wish to declare their love for each other, while endeavouring to live together chastely as brother and brother, or as sister and sister?
