By Father Kevin M Cusick
Let’s talk about blessings.
With Fiducia supplicans, the bizarre intervention of Tucho Fernandez and rubber-stamped by Francis, the whole subject of blessings is in the air again. The fork-tongued double-speak of the document employs weaponized ambiguity to get the outcome desired of approving same-sex (read sodomitic) mutual sexual gratification. This while genuflecting to marriage and sacramental teaching just enough to placate those weak bishops who want just enough wiggle room to avoid the discomfort of outright opposition.
Although it has ever been an unauthorized innovation, which has multiplied into seeming ubiquity since the new Mass was promulgated with rubrics such as “in this or similar words”, the custom of welcoming people to the communion rail at Mass for a blessing who have no intention of receiving Communion has spread widely in the Church.
At first glance it appears pastoral. We don’t want anyone to feel excluded at a social event. A wedding is a happy occasion and we wouldn’t want to cast a pall over the proceedings.
A bridesmaid at a wedding could be baptized Catholic, a Catholic-educated public apostate, working for a diabolic organization such as Teen Vogue, and with no intention of going to Confession or ever returning to the Catholic Faith, but up she will come, together with the other bridesmaids of the wedding, for a blessing at the Communion time of the wedding Mass. A mockery of the idea of blessings and of the Faith itself.
This scene is repeated numerous times all over Catholic America, with many avoiding Confession or indefinitely delaying the practice of the Catholic Faith as a result. An officially sanctioned, as it were, placebo to stand in place of the Faith and the Sacraments which are the reason the Church and the priesthood exists in the first place. A pastoral disaster.
What should happen rarely does. Opportunity for Confession should be offered prior to every holy Mass, and in particular on Sundays. And the need for such pastoral solicitude is even greater at weddings and funerals, when so many non-practicing Catholics actually darken the door of the Church once again after an extended period of being a “Catholic on leave”.
The Catholic world does not yet groan to find itself Bergoglian. The bishops of Malawi, Cameroon, Zambia, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Poland, Hungary and others have spoken out against the impossibility of blessing sin which Fiducia supplicans invites.
Bishop Robert Mutsaerts, the auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, has issued a statement on what he calls the “diabolical ambiguity” of the document arising from “… the confusing passages in the statement. Why does one ask for a blessing? To remove the brokenness in one’s life. After all, it is God’s blessing that is being asked for. The first question to ask is: Would God want to give His blessing on this? God who loves nothing more than for people to come to repentance to share in God’s love. Can God give his blessing to a sinner? As mentioned, yes, of course. Repentant sinners who come to repentance are heartily pardoned. An entirely different question is: Can God give his blessing on sin? Of course not! We love the sinner, but hate the sin. In all three forms of blessing (sacramental, formal, informal) exactly the same principle applies. And this is where it goes wrong in Fiducia Supplicans. A gay Christian can be blessed individually. But one cannot bless a gay relationship, because the Church characterizes it as disordered, or sinful. God giving His blessing on a sin, it is a travesty!”
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller stands on the side of clear teaching in full fidelity to Catholic truth as well.
In “The Only Blessing of Mother Church is the Truth That Will Set Us Free. Note on the Declaration Fiducia supplicans” he says the document “has made an affirmation that has no precedent in the teaching of the Catholic Church. In fact, this document affirms that it is possible for a priest to bless (not liturgically, but privately) couples who live in a sexual relationship outside of marriage, including same-sex couples.”
“The difficulty of blessing a union or couple is especially evident in the case of homosexuality. For in the Bible, a blessing has to do with the order that God has created and that he has declared to be good. This order is based on the sexual difference of male and female, called to be one flesh. Blessing a reality that is contrary to creation is not only impossible, it is blasphemy. Once again, it is not a question of blessing persons who ‘live in a union that cannot be compared in any way to marriage’ (FS, n. 30), but of blessing the very union that cannot be compared to marriage. It is precisely for this purpose that a new kind of blessing is created (FS 7, 12).’”
So, what would result if a priest follows the urging of FS? Muller explains:
“According to FS, he (the priest) could do so with a non-liturgical, non-official ‘pastoral’ blessing. This would mean that the priest would have to give these blessings without acting in the name of Christ and the Church. But this would mean that he would not be acting as a priest. In fact, he would have to give these blessings not as a priest of Christ, but as one who has rejected Christ. In fact, by his actions, the priest who blesses these unions presents them as a path to the Creator. Therefore, he commits a sacrilegious and blasphemous act against the Creator’s plan and against Christ’s death for us, which meant to fulfill the Creator’s plan.”
And so, the Pope has promulgated a document calling for priests to participate in and to accommodate a “blasphemy”. This serves only to cause division in the Church, when the priest himself commits a sin by simulating a “blessing”: division between those who reject the Catholic Faith, that is, the truth, and those who do not. The devil is the author of division, therefore the document is in fact diabolic.
The first and greatest blessing Catholic sinners need is, in fact, the grace of Confession.
At a recent funeral offered for his mother by a priest-son he arranged for priests to be present prior to the Mass in the confessional and informed his family. Family members readily took advantage of the opportunity. A number of confessions were heard that day. Priests could immediately begin to bridge the Confession gap in the practice of the Faith on the part of a large percentage of Catholics by immediately beginning once again to offer Confessions prior to Sunday Mass, as was the long-standing practice in years past.
Doesn’t a Eucharistic revival, a project of the US Bishops for 2024, presume a wider, graced and, therefore, effective reception of the Holy Eucharist? That always begins with correct and regular reception of the sacrament of Penance. There is no revival of faith and practice of Eucharistic life without the sacrament of Penance. Perhaps a Confession Revival would have been a good first step to prepare for a revival also of Eucharistic faith and piety?
A Merry Christmas Season and a Blessed New Year to all of our readers. Thank you.
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