SO WHAT DID THE POPE JUST DO? AN EXPLAINER ON CATHOLIC BLESSINGS

5 Questions about Blessing Queer Couples in the Church

In place of our normal Wow, I thought I’d follow up on the Pope’s announcement with a sort of deeper dive into what it all means.

What did the Pope Francis just do for gay couples?

On Monday, Pope Francis announced that priests and deacons have the right to bless gay married couples.

This has never previously been allowed by the Vatican. That’s not to say priests might not have done it *wink wink*. But honestly, any time I’ve ever heard clergy talk about having done such a thing, which is not often, it’s always had the character of *looks both ways, make sure no one is listening.* Much like speaking publicly about women’s ordination, blessing a gay couple was the kind of thing that was generally understood could get you in a lot of trouble with a bishop.

So yeah, this is a major change in policy.

In the Catholic Church, what is a blessing?

The Vatican document has a whole section on the definition of blessings.

Here’s one quirky way of understanding them: When you were a kid, did your parents ever leave you a note in your sack lunch/Star Wars lunchbox? A little “I <3 U” or “Good luck at tryouts” or “Happy Birthday, Jen,” which was meant for your sister but you took her lunch because she got better sandwiches?

In a way, a blessing is like a lunch box post-it note that you ask for from God. And it can involve just about anything. Your knee got scraped up? You can ask the priest to bless it. You love your dog and you want her to have a good year? Show up at church on the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi and ask for a blessing. Someone gave you a new rosary? Or you got a new car? Or it’s time for the harvest? Sure, ask for a blessing.

In a sense, when we ask for a blessing we’re saying God, can you help me, or protect this, or look out for that? But also more generally, God, would you please give me some sense that you’re in my life? When we ask for a blessing, we want to have a felt experience of God. We want to have some sense that God is here.

As silly as blessing requests can potentially get—Really, we’re blessing his Baby Yoda doll?— underlying that practice is a really important idea: for Catholics, as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” That is, the material universe is not somehow bad or in opposition to God. God moves and lives within everything, and so everything can be a source of encouragement or inspiration, a reminder of God’s love.

By refusing to allow clergy to bless queer couples, the Church insisted that their commitment or nature is so contrary to God’s ways that God cannot be conceived of being present there.  Which is super harsh, as the Vatican department in charge of doctrine made abundantly clear in 2021 when it wrote that blessings of queer marriages were not allowed because “God does not bless sin.”  

Is blessing gay couples the same as marrying them?  

It’s definitely not. The Vatican statement today makes that very clear. “Rites and prayers that could create confusion between what constitutes marriage—which is the ‘exclusive, stable, and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the generation of children’—and what contradicts it are inadmissible.”

In other words, if you’re going to bless a queer couple, that blessing can’t look or sound like a wedding.

Having said that, if you visit the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops’ page on blessings, the general format they suggest for blessings has a lot of similarities in structure with a wedding or Mass. The big element missing is the sacramental piece, i.e. the wedding vows and exchange of rings.

I’d say that’s probably the big no-no. It should not appear as though the married couple are making or renewing their vows in the church.

There’s no reason a priest or deacon couldn’t bless the couple’s rings, however.

Is blessing gay couples the same as marrying them? (2023 Dance Remix)

As I said above, I think blessings have two dimensions: they’re meant to provide some sort of help; and they’re meant to be a moment in which we experience that help.

I really learned that doing blessings during communion. When an adult would come up and ask for a blessing instead of the Eucharist, it always struck me as an important moment. There’s nothing forcing them to come up; they’re doing it out of some want or need.

And while some of that was no doubt super specific, I always felt like there was also just a desire to be in contact with God right then and there. To have a Moment.

I think whenever we talk about blessings in the Catholic Church, both levels are in play. A blessing is a prayer in which God is asked to help a person, place, thing, or animal in some specific way.

But a blessing is also a kind of holy moment in which we hope to have a sense of something more that we’re a part of, experience a connection or sense of love that we may not normally feel. The moment of blessing is hopefully itself a blessing.

And this is where the notion of blessing gay couples versus marriage gets a little fuzzy. Blessing a couple will absolutely not be a marriage ceremony. And yet, what a queer couple and others may experience at such a blessing may in fact be very much the same as others experience at a wedding—a sense of God’s presence welcoming, loving, encouraging them.

So even if a blessing is not a wedding ceremony per se, still, I would be surprised if the lived experience for the couple and everyone else present isn’t similar to that of a wedding.

Why is the Catholic blessing of gay couples such a big deal?

There are many answers to this question. Here are two:

1. It affirms that the lives and relationships of queer Catholics are positive and have meaning for the community. Queer Catholics have spent their whole lives being told implicitly and explicitly by the Church that there is something wrong with them because of whom they love. In blessing committed queer Catholic relationships, the Church is affirming that those relationships are themselves a good thing.

   This also means queer couples are appreciated as a source of blessing themselves. Any service that happens in a church is not just for the people who are present but for the community. It’s the reason many parishes insist on having baptisms as part of a community Mass; we support the baptized and their family in this way, but also being present at the baptism is understood to be a source of grace and God’s presence for us.

   By allowing public blessings of queer couples, the Church is acknowledging that committed queer relationships are a gift for the broader church.

2. It allows queer Catholics to have an experience of God’s care that has been denied them. I once heard Jim Martin give a talk about queer Catholics. One of the most powerful (and yet most obvious) insights was that queer Catholics have a lot more going on in their lives than just sex. That is to say, they have spiritual lives, and they come to church to be fed.

   While the lack of an official church blessing certainly hasn’t prevented queer couples from feeling blessed, it has denied them that specific experience of spiritual encouragement and welcome that can happen at a church ceremony.

   And I suspect that will mean a tremendous amount to them and to others. Imagine the Holy Spirit as like a river that’s been blocked for a long time. Pope Francis just took down the dam.

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I hope that’s helpful and not too inside church baseball!

I’ll be back later this week with an interview with Kelly Younger, the writer of the new Prime movie Candy Cane Lane, which features amongst other things a hip hop tuba (which is freaking awesome).

I’ll be off for Christmas and New Year’s, so no Wows next week. But then we’re off and running into 2024!