German Roman Catholics can receive same sex blessings

 Don't say you were not warned, but this story from the Catholic Herald shows that the slippery slope has started for Roman Catholics.

A German archbishop has told priests they can confer blessings on same-sex couples without fear of punishment.

The move by Archbishop Heiner Koch of Berlin opens the gates to church services for the blessings of couples who “cannot or do not want to marry sacramentally”.

In a five-page, 2,000-word letter, the archbishop told the priest of his archdiocese that “it is no longer possible to say that all who are in any so-called irregular situation are in a state of mortal sin and have lost sanctifying grace”.

“Acknowledging the goodness of a relationship is a way of speaking well of God to those people,” he wrote, according to reports.

He quoted Amoris Laetitia, the 2016 apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis on the pastoral care of families, to emphasise however that a blessing did not infer approval or legitimisation but the acknowledgement that “we all remain guilty people who need the edifying grace of God for our path in life”.

“Pope Francis emphatically calls for pastoral discernment,” wrote Archbishop Koch, adding that the Pontiff “gives the local churches, the pastors, a lot of leeway in dealing with people in so-called ‘irregular’ situations”.

He urged priests to use their judgement in deciding who was eligible for such blessings and said he hoped the archdiocese would succeed in “preserving unity in diversity”.

The archbishop also reminded priests that Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, the Argentine prefect-designate of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, whom the Pope will make a cardinal next month, is open to same-sex blessings as long as they remain distinctive from marriage.

Archbishop Koch said such blessings would not be “a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak”.

But at the same time as he permitted priests to confer same-sex blessings, he said he would not perform such ceremonies in person until the Pope had explicitly permitted them to take place.

Instead, he said he would continue to personally abide by the 2021 decree of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that prohibited such blessings.

It appears that the Pope initiated the slide down the slippery slope in his Amoris Laetitia, or at least that is what the German archbishop is hanging his miter on. 

Pope Francis is a softie, so I think the Germans will get away with this. We shall have to wait and see who else hops on the bobsled.