On the Blessing of LGBTQ Persons

Recently, the Holy Father did something that I regard as both perfectly compatible with the Faith and entirely in character for this most pastoral and evangelistic of Popes: he made clear that persons in same sex unions can receive priestly blessings.

The reasoning behind this seems perfectly transparent to me, but as per usual, the Greatest Catholics of All Time completely lost their minds and either declared that he was “confusing” them (code for ‘we hate what he says and does so we will pretend we don’t understand what he says and and does’) or, as in the case of the more nakedly sociopathic narcissists, they called for him to be defenestrated all while displaying their trademark tendency to speak as though Francis’ failure to hate their victims somehow constituted an act of “persecution” against themselves.

(I hate being right all the time, but Zmirak really is a living laboratory demonstration of my thesis that Radical Lack of Empathy and Obsessive Self-Pity are the Defining Marks of Conservative Psychology in the Age of MAGA.)

Anyway, what is very clear to me is that Francis is trying to begin with a Catholic anthropology of the human person as made in the image of God rather than the sort of bowdlerized and debased Calvinist anthropology (which starts with an absurd doctrine of Total Depravity) that has come to dominate the well-funded reaches of so-called “Faithful Conservative Catholicism” now at war with the Magisterium and centered in the US. Catholic anthropology begins with the fact that “man is the only creature whom God has willed for his own sake”, that he is made in the image and likeness of God, and that there is not, never has been, and never will be any person for whom Christ did not suffer.

As such, the Church begins with the fact that each person you will ever meet is blessed by God and that it is better to start there in our relationship–from love and blessedness–than to start with the ungovernable lust to act as inquisitor and say, “You know what’s wrong with you? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you and you will sit there and take it. If I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you. And I don’t want it. My job is to stoop down from Sinai and tell you what the hell is the matter with you. Your job is to like it and if you don’t, that just shows how right I am and what a rebel against God you are.”

For some reason, this strategy for communicating the love of God to LGBTQ persons does not seem to work. So Francis calls us to start where the Tradition starts: with the blessing of God on every human person, made in the likeness of the God and blessed by the Messiah who died and rose for them.

Yes, yes, yes: We all know what comes next in the Kneejerk World of Self-Regarding Faithful Conservative Catholicism[TM]. ”But!” comes the great ungovernable cry of the Greatest Catholics of All Time, who want to spend as few nanoseconds as humanly possible actually living out a relationship of love or even minimal respect with LGBTQ persons in their extreme rush to get on to what they really hunger to do: tell them what is wrong with them and do everything possible to make sure they are never told that God loves them.

Francis, however, does not share that eagerness to rush past meeting people where they are in all their actual lived experience. He seems to think that, rather like the rest of us, LGBTQ persons might appreciate being treated like people and not like problems or projects.

Hence he starts with blessing them and urges us to linger on the point.

Of course, what the Greatest Catholics of All Time fear (for their lives are dominated by fear, not by faith) is that Francis will somehow defeat God and do something the Faith has always said is impossible; destroy the Deposit of Faith. Indeed, Zmirak calls Francis an “atheist pope” and blasphemes God by declaring that the contempt he bears toward those who fail to hate Francis is some kind of inspiration from God.

No. Really:

I do feel profound contempt, a scorn which I know that God Himself has poured into my heart, for disingenuous professional Catholics who live off the faithful’s dime, and are still trying to hoodwink them that Pope Francis is a Catholic.

In this particular case, Reactionaries are afraid that Francis will fundamentally change the nature of the sacrament of Marriage, and thereby bring the entirety of the Church’s sacramental order crashing to the ground.

But that is not what blessing gay persons (or any person) does. It has nothing to do one way or the other with the sacrament of Marriage. It’s about persons.

Some will darkly prophesy that only a man and woman can contract a sacramental marriage in the Catholic tradition and that this is what the Great Apostate Francis is ultimately aiming to destroy. Others will make the same argument and complain that he has not gone far enough by sacramentalizing gay unions.

Both arguments seem to me to forget that the sacraments, though they are for us, are not about us. They are about Christ. So the liberal’s charge that Marriage is “about genitalia” in the Church seems to me as reductionist as charging that the Eucharist is about baking and wine-making. The matter of the Eucharist is bread and wine, not cheese and milk, because they are the fitting symbols that symbolize what they do and do what they symbolize. Nothing against cheese and milk. The matter of Baptism is water, not wine. The matter of the sacrament of Marriage is bride and groom.

So while the Church can bless LGBTQ persons just as she can bless a meal, she cannot make a sacrament out of a gay union any more than she can baptize with beer, consecrate cheese and milk in the Mass, or anoint with motor oil. The matter of the sacraments matters. In the end, the sacrament of Marriage is about Christ (and the Bride), not about the people being married. So the matter of the sacrament cannot be altered. I did not write Ephesians 5, the story of the wedding at Cana, the book of Revelation, or the many passages in which Jesus calls himself the Bridegroom and likens the Church to his Bride. But I do believe them, and therefore do not think for one second that Francis will alter the sacrament of marriage since he knows perfectly well that we are not the center, Christ is. There are things it is possible for him to do and things that are simply not possible due to the nature of the revelation.

Others argue about whether the Church can and cannot “change”. That, of course, depends on what you mean by “change”. In one sense, She has been constantly evolving since Pentecost. In another sense, She remain who She is–The Bride of Christ–till Judgment Day and beyond. So Fr. James Martin is simply dead right when he points out:

So this also does represent a change in praxis–and a very significant one–and yet it does not represent a change in the Church’s basic teaching on the dignity of the human person. That is, it represents a step toward more fully realizing and implementing the implications of the Church’s perennial teaching about the dignity of the human person that Catholics have always only grasped imperfectly. In a similar way, the Church’ final and complete rejection of slavery (which only occurred at Vatican II) represented both a real change, but also a reaffimation of something that had been latent in the Tradition since the Exodus. 

Relatedly, what this change does not represent is a change in the dogmatic teaching of the Church or in the form or matter of the sacrament of Marriage. To be sure, dogma can sometimes change in the sense of development. That is, the Church can and does become more Herself over time, just as the mustard seed can and does become more mustardy, not less, by changing from a seed to a plant. But the mustard seed can only develop into a mustard plant. It cannot develop into an octopus or a pine tree. So the Church’s understanding of God could develop from the simple understanding that there is one God, and somehow Jesus is His Son who gives the Spirit until it finally issued in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. But there will never ever ever be a mutation in which the Church suddenly decides that, on second thought, there is no God, or there are multiple gods, or Taylor Swift is pretty popular right now so let’s admit her to the Blessed Trinity. Doctrine can develop, but it cannot mutate or contradict itself.

So here. One very good reason that this change in praxis regarding blessing gay persons (completely rooted in the ancient teaching of the Church that every person is made in the image of God and one for whom Christ died and rose) does not have anything to do with the sacrament of Marriage per se is that (at least in the western tradition) nobody is ever “married by a priest”. Rather, the man and woman in a sacramental marriage marry each other while the priest is a witness to their consent to administer (and indeed be) the sacrament to one another. A priest cannot marry a gay couple because a priest cannot marry any couple. They marry each other.

What Francis means to do–and has done by this act–is to reassert very loudly against an Inquisitorial subculture that wants very much to drive LGBTQ persons completely away from any and all access to Jesus that this subculture cannot and must not have their way. His goal is to start at a much more fundamental level than the Sacrament of Marriage: with the blessing God pronounces on every single human being without any exception whatsoever; that they are persons made in the image of God for whom Christ died and rose, whom every disciple of Christ is called to love, respect and honor.

My point is that this is about the dignity of human beings, including couples. What’s it’s not about, and the document takes pains to make clear it is not about, is an alteration in the form, matter, or nature of the sacrament of Marriage. And that really matters because, as I say, it is the LGBTQ person as such that the Reactionaries hate, reject, and deny are capable of receiving the love of God. It’s not ultimately about marriage for the Reactionaries screaming about this. It’s about the acceptance of LGBTQ persons as being made in the image and likeness of God and person for whom Christ died and rose being capable of salvation and worthy of our love. At most, the anti-Francis sect offers a dim, shadowy theoretical acknowledgement of this as being possible in some cloud cuckoo realm. But in practical real life terms, the way that gets expressed by Reactionaries is to immediately turn to telling LGBTQ people what is wrong with them and communicating to them non-stop that they are a threat, a problem, and repulsive to God. Francis’ act represents a direct repudiation of that, which is why the Perfecti hate his living guts.

the Greatest Catholics of All Time endlessly speak to and about LGBTQ people as irredeemably and intrinsically incompatible with the love of God. Nothing they ever do, no profession of faith in Christ, no obedience to his word will ever be enough to overcome the conviction of these Inquisitors that they do not really love God and seek to love neighbor. Francis is reasserting against this whole mindset, along with Peter, that “God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” (Ac 10:34–35)

To which I say, “Bravo!”