A Belgian bishop has lashed out at the Vatican for his decree that the Catholic Church will not bless gay unions
BRUSSELS – A Belgian bishop has lashed out at the Vatican for his decree that the Catholic Church will not bless gay unions as God “cannot bless sin”.
Antwerp bishop Johan Bonny wrote in an opinion piece on Wednesday that he feels ‘ashamed of my church’ and ‘intellectual and moral incomprehension’ after Pope Francis approved the ‘negative’ answer to a question whether Catholic clergy have the authority to share the same sex. to bless. labor unions. The official answer said that God “cannot bless sin.”
Bonny, who was part of a 2015 Vatican Synod on Marriage and Family, said, “I want to apologize to anyone for whom this is painful and incomprehensible.”
The conference of Belgian bishops supported Bonny’s concerns, saying that LGBT believers and their families viewed the Vatican decree as “extremely painful”. The conference called on everyone to work towards “a climate of respect, recognition and integration”.
The Vatican’s position has pleased conservatives, discouraged advocates of LGBT Catholics, and thrown a key into a debate within the German Catholic Church, which has been at the forefront of opening discussions on hot-button issues such as Catholic teachings on homosexuality.
Bonny said he was disappointed by the level of arguments that passed through the note from the Vatican’s Orthodoxy office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
“Intellectually, this doesn’t even reach the level of secondary school. You see these kinds of arguments, the logic, right through it. You don’t convince anyone like that these days, ”Bonny said.
In the note of the congregation, a distinction was made between the blessing of homosexuals and the welcoming and blessing of gays by the church, which it endorsed. It argued that such unions were not part of God’s plan and that any sacramental recognition of them could be confused with marriage.
The Vatican states that gays should be treated with dignity and respect, but that gay sex is “intrinsically disordered.” According to Catholic teaching, marriage is a lifelong union between a man and a woman that is part of God’s plan and is intended to create new life.
The Orthodoxy Office document stated that homosexuals cannot be blessed by the Catholic Church because they are not part of that plan.
God “cannot and cannot bless sin: He blesses sinful man so that he can recognize that he is part of his love plan and allow himself to be changed by him,” the note said.
In his op-ed published in the Belgian newspaper De Standaard, Bonny replied that “sin is one of the most difficult theological and moral categories to define, and one of the last to define people and their way of living together.”
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a similar decree in 2003 stating that the Church’s respect for homosexuals “cannot in any way lead to approval of homosexual behavior or legal recognition of homosexual unions.”
Traditionally, Belgium has been a staunch Roman Catholic country with strong ties to the Vatican. But the number of believers and attendance at church services has declined in recent decades.
The nation is dotted with churches large and small, but their death notices are almost always greater than those for baptisms.