Pope Francis radically shifted the Roman Catholic Church’s stance on LGBTQ issues on Monday, formally allowing priests to bless same-sex unions.
Such unions can only be blessed if the ritual or service does not resemble the sacrament of marriage that is performed in the church and are not liturgical.
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Driving the news: Francis’s approval came in a document released by the Vatican on Monday.
- The document explains that people seeking God’s love and mercy should not be subject to an exhaustive moral analysis as a precondition for receiving blessings.
- The Vatican’s ruling emphasizes that marriage is a lifelong sacrament between a man and a woman and blessings should not be performed simultaneously with civil unions.
- It also says that requests for same-sex blessings should not be denied, offering a broad definition of the term “blessing.”
- Francis wrote that people looking for God’s love and mercy should not be subject to “an exhaustive moral analysis.”
- “The request for a blessing, thus, expresses and nurtures openness to the transcendence, mercy, and closeness to God in a thousand concrete circumstances of life, which is no small thing in the world in which we live,” the document reads. “It is a seed of the Holy Spirit that must be nurtured, not hindered.”
