Around the world for the past twenty-four hours, headlines have boomed that the Catholic Church has opened new possibilities for the formal blessings of same-sex unions.

Newspapers such as the Washington Post have published articles declaring that the “Vatican says yes to blessings of same-sex unions” — but this is gravely misleading, and not representative of what has actually been announced.

On the contrary, Victor “Tucho” Fernández, the head of the Holy Office, restated previous clarifications by the Vatican by beginning his letter (which has Pope Francis’s signature) thus: “this Declaration remains firm on the traditional doctrine of the Church about marriage, not allowing any type of liturgical rite or blessing similar to a liturgical rite that can create confusion.”

The letter later explained that any blessing must be given “without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage”. Doubling down, it firmly warned clerics:

So why the misinterpretation? Clearly, there are ambiguities in the statement that have caused major misunderstandings. For one, the document makes a quite legitimate distinction between “spontaneous blessing” and procedural and “ritual” blessings in an ecclesiastical setting. It supports the former for “same-sex couples” but not, and here is the important distinction, for “same-sex unions”, as the Washington Post is misreporting. 

I was recently one of the 1.6 million Catholic attendees at World Youth Day with the Pope in Lisbon. Whenever I saw a priest in a cassock, I would approach him and ask, “May I have a blessing, Father”, to which he would in every instance oblige. I would kneel and bow my head, as the priest would make a sign of the cross in the air, on my forehead, or would lay his hand on my scalp. This is fairly normal in a Catholic setting.

This is the “spontaneous blessing” Fernández and the Church encourage for homosexuals. They may be given to anyone — lay Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, or “spiritual but not religious”. They are very brief, comparably far less formal, and aimed at a specific and unique human person as a soul in need of divine help to live well – rather than an affirmation or confirmation of any specific circumstances. In other words, the Church is there to help any soul in need, but she can’t encourage any behaviour or lifestyle she holds as contrary to their own good.

The distinction between blessing the couple, who are understood as a pair of sinners no different from any other in this regard, and blessing the union itself (which would be seen as an endorsement) has been thus poorly understood. Yesterday’s document, by placing so much emphasis on the fact the couples are invited to one (non-affirming) form of blessing and not another (which would legitimise and encourage same-sex sexual activity), can be understood as partly to blame in its eagerness to reassure readers of the Church’s inclusivity.

Which brings us to the second aspect of the document which must be explained in context: why was it published?

Bishops in Belgium published a 2022 document which contradicted earlier Vatican clarifications (this time reprimanding the famously liberal German bishops) that the Church cannot, and is powerless to, bless sin and thus same-sex unions. The latest document appears to be a magisterial response (at least indirectly) to those who may be liable to erroneously take the Belgian bishops’ position. The perpetuation of any sinful activity is not something the Church can ever encourage.

This story, then, leaves us with a paradox. Two otherwise liberal senior clerics wanted to reprimand and remind even more progressive bishops than them that they may not take their take their outreach efforts to the LGBT+ community too far. Yet in their attempts at clarity, they caused the precise confusion they were attempting to tackle.

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Thomas Colsy is an editorial assistant at the Catholic Herald.

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