Top Vatican Cardinal: Pope's Same-Sex Edict 'Misleads the Faithful'

The former head of the Vatican's doctrinal office called Pope Francis' recent approval allowing priests to bless same-sex couples blasphemous.

Francis' approval stems from a document called Fiducia Supplicans (FS), released Monday by the Vatican's doctrinal office, and it represents a change in the Vatican's policy by stating that people who seek love and mercy from God should not have to go through an "exhaustive moral analysis" to receive it.

"The difficulty of blessing a union or couple is especially evident in the case of homosexuality," Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who led the Vatican's doctrinal office from 2012 to 2017, wrote in an essay published Thursday by The Pillar.

"For in the Bible, a blessing has to do with the order that God has created and that he has declared to be good. This order is based on the sexual difference of male and female, called to be one flesh. Blessing a reality that is contrary to creation is not only impossible, it is blasphemy."

Müller wrote FS is contradictory because it reaffirms traditional Catholic teaching that marriage is a union between a man and a woman and that any sexual relations outside of marriage are sinful and not to be condoned.

"The Church cannot celebrate one thing and teach another because, as St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote, Christ was the Teacher 'who spoke and it was done' [Ephesians 15:1], and one cannot separate his flesh from his word," Müller wrote.

Müller wrote although the church can add new sacramentals to existing ones, "she cannot change their meaning in such a way as to trivialize sin, especially in an ideologically charged cultural situation that also misleads the faithful."

"And this change of meaning is precisely what happens in FS, which invents a new category of blessings beyond those associated with either a sacrament or a blessing as the Church has understood them," he wrote.

Müller wrote priests should proclaim God's love and goodness to all people and also help sinners and those who are weak and have difficulty in conversion with counsel and prayer.

"This is very different from pointing out to them with self-invented but misleading signs and words that God is not so demanding about sin, thus hiding the fact that sin in thought, word and deed distances us from God," he wrote.

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