Fiducia Supplicans: an exercise in smoke and mirrors, where spin becomes substance and appearance reality

Dec 22, 2023 by Dave Doveton

By Gavin Ashenden, Catholic Herald. (Editor’s note: A helpful exposé of the sophistry used to justify ‘prayers of blessing’ – a fairly similar strategy is employed by the Church of England)

St John Henry Newman once considered the possibility of the crisis that would emerge if a Church council or a pope introduced a doctrine that contradicted a previous council or a pope. It would shatter the notion of doctrinal development.

At first sight the recent document Fiducia Supplicans suggests that this might have happened. Commentators have been trying to square its content with the previous declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in 2021 that it was not licit to bless homosexual relationships.

However, any careful reading of this latest text shows clearly that the document sets out to specifically maintain and restate the Church’s teaching on marriage. Having done that, it nonetheless sets out a platform for the provision of a blessing for those who are in disordered relationships.

It is again made clear that there are intended to be safeguards to avoid giving the impression that any blessing might suggest a wedding or a union is being blessed. There must be no liturgy and only spontaneity. The theological assumption appears to be that there is a sufficient gap between a liturgical blessing and a spontaneous one that defends the integrity of Church teaching. Whether that is the case or ought to be, is not examined.

This allows the cosmetically reassuring response: “Nothing has happened, nothing has changed in church teaching.”

And yet at the same time, newspapers and public media across the world have announced that the Pope has changed the teaching of the Catholic Church and agreed to gay blessings.

The situation created by Fiducia Supplicans is both more subtle, and in the eyes of critics more insidious.

If it had changed Church doctrine the situation that St John Henry Newman feared would be upon us. The Church would face a crisis in its understanding of how to understand the magisterium and the consistent development of doctrine. There would be a formal challenge to the Pope and the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), and a challenge of unique theological and political proportions.

But the Vatican has not taken that route. It has followed a different strategy. It has set out to appear to change the Church’s teaching without in fact changing it. The distinction is achieved by changing the practice but not the principle. Orthodoxy remains untarnished, but orthopraxy—correct practise and worship—has been subverted.

This is for many confusing. Once again, the hallmarks that have coloured the last ten years or so of this papacy re-emerge: ambiguity, confusion and perhaps chaos.

Read here.