“Fiducia Supplicans” Is a Challenge—That Offers Great Hope and Opportunity

Three Catholic leaders sense great hope and opportunity for LGBTQ+ people, as well as for the wider church, in the Vatican’s December 2023 declaration which allowed for blessings of same-gender couples.

In a conversation last Sunday hosted by New Ways Ministry, entitled “Being Blessed: The Challenge of Fiducia Supplicans,” two theologians and a pastoral leader spoke about the complex reception of Fiducia Supplicans, the Vatican’s groundbreaking declaration about blessings.

Xavier Montecel, Assistant Professor at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas; SimonMary Aihiokhai, Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Portland, Oregon; and Yunuen Trujillo, Religious Formation Coordinator (Spanish) for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’s Catholic Ministry with Lesbian and Gay Persons all lifted up the possibilities that this document raises for LGBTQ+ Catholics, as well as the challenges it raises for a church still journeying.

Montecel presented three changes that characterize this declaration. First, he sees that the possibility of blessings represents a change to the welcome LGBTQ+ Catholics receive from the church. He stated: 

“. . . [F]or the first time the validity of their  presence […] in our communities has been acknowledged. After the publication of the declaration, it has become possible to stay in our communities of faith. Not only that [same-sex couples] are here, but that you ought to be here, that you have a place here. At a more functional level, prior to the declaration, no priest in the Catholic Church could explicitly bless a same-sex couple. And after the declaration, now any priest can do so with the sanction of the highest authorities in the church.”

Second, Montecel highlighted the pastoral turn of the document as “Pope Francis’ method in action.” He said the document shifts toward accompaniment and mercy, while also refusing to “let the ideal become the enemy of the good.” Third, the scholar underlined the development of a theology of blessings open to all, particularly in the declaration’s affirmation that “the possibility that blessings are appropriate with or without certain moral prerequisites.” Such changes, while important, still leave room for growth. Montecel raised concerns about “the extent to which this [document] creates a sort of theological second class into which LGBTQ folks and other folks in irregular situations are installed.”

SimonMary Aihiokhai situated Fiducia Supplicans within a wider theological context, arguing that this declaration draws upon awareness of the church as a community that does not stand still, and whose movement is directed by the Holy Spirit. He contrasted theology that focuses upon the stability of the church with Fiducia Supplicans’s Spirit-led openness to change. He observed that “a seismic change has occurred, moving away from a very Constantinian notion of stability to more of a pneumatological [Spirit-led] embrace of reading the signs of the times.”

This new perspective reverses the expected dynamic of who learns from whom in the church, particularly in regard to LGBTQ+ realities. Rather than asking what LGBTQ+ Catholics in same-gender relations should learn from the church, Aihiokhai asked “How does the Spirit speak to the church through these relationships?”

Yunuen Trujillo emphasized how much good witnessing LGBTQ+ Catholics asking for and receiving blessings would do for those couples themselves and for the wider church. She asked the poignant question: “Why is it so hard for some people within the church to rejoice in the idea of blessings for same gender couples and other couples? Why is it so hard?” Trujillo suggested an answer: “The institutional church and our parish communities have been too far away from the lived experience of LGBTQ Catholics,” a failing that this declaration begins to rectify.

Trujillo also highlighted how couples will receive the potential grace and spiritual benefits from these blessings:

“Now, there is goodness in us. There’s good in our relationships, but that doesn’t mean that our relationships are perfect, right? . . . [We’re still humans, we still have a lot of things to improve. And we need the help of God and our community for our relationships to thrive. And so this is where we might come humbly and ask God to help us. . . . Fiducia Supplicans [states], we humbly ask for a blessing so that  ‘all that is true, good and humanly valid in [our] lives,’ that which already exists in our lives, and relationships, ‘be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit.’ In the question and answer period, webinar participants asked about some of the ambiguity and tensions in the document and in its reception.”

Addressing some of the pastoral realities of the reception of the declaration, Trujillo noted that the unevenness of its reception by different pastoral leaders means that because “there’s all this messiness, there’s a lot of people that are getting hurt.” She cautioned:

“A lot of our parish spaces are emotionally toxic, and so if somebody goes up to a priest who has not started this journey of discernment on this topic, it can be very harmful. . . . If your priest is not in this journey of discernment, don’t put yourself in the line to get hurt, because we have to love ourselves before we love neighbor and God or at the same time.”

In discussing the global reception of Fiducia Supplicans, Aihiokhai, a Nigerian teaching in the United States, related the lively if sometimes difficult conversation occurring in Africa among bishops, religious, pastoral workers and theologians on how to understand the declaration. He related how members of the Pan-African Catholic Theology and Pastoral Network (Pactpan) have been having “a very messy conversation” since the document’s release in December, but argued “this conversation is better than not having it at all. Something is happening and it is good. It is messy and what is beautiful is always messy.”

Despite these challenges, all panelists expressed their hope that this declaration has opened doors for greater welcome and pastoral accompaniment of LGBTQ+ Catholic in the church. As Trujillo explained:

“There is grace here and there is perhaps something new that the Holy Spirit is trying to tell us that we haven’t paid attention to. And so my hope is that this is not a final document, it is a document in a series of documents that will appear through that journey that will hopefully end in celebration. That is my hope. I don’t think this is a journey we can control. It’s not a journey the Pope can control. This is the Holy Spirit’s journey and you cannot stop the Holy Spirit.”

A recording of the 1-hour webinar is now available of New Ways Ministry’s website. To view, click here.

—Brian Flanagan (he/him), New Ways Ministry, March 1, 2024