

It’s fair to say he should have seen it coming.
“He” in that sentence is Pope Francis. The thing that was coming, well, it came on Friday: a caustic statement from the Coptic Orthodox Church announcing the suspension of ecumenical relations with Rome.
The reason for the Coptic Orthodox withdrawal was the recent DDF declaration, Fiducia supplicans, on the blessing of couples in “irregular unions” including same-sex unions.
The Coptic Orthodox Church took the decision at a meeting over which their leader, Pope Tawadros II, presided in Alexandria.
“After consultation with the sister churches of the Eastern Orthodox family,” a March 7th press release from the Coptic Orthodox Church reads, “it was decided to suspend the theological dialogue with the Catholic Church, re-evaluate the results that the dialogue has achieved since its beginning twenty years ago, and establish new standards and mechanisms for the dialogue to proceed.”
So, the Coptic Orthodox decision came after broad consultation and is a powerful indicator of Eastern Orthodox ecclesiastical sentiment generally.
In fact, the Coptic Orthodox are not the first Orthodox Church to express dismay over Fiducia supplicans.
A high-ranking Russian Orthodox prelate who served as the Russian Orthodox Church’s chief ecumenical officer for years, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev of Budapest, led a meeting of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Synodal Biblical-Theological Commission in February, at which Russia’s bishops decided unanimously that Fiducia supplicans is an “innovation” that “manifests a sharp deviation from the Christian moral teaching.”
Coupled with a statement from Russia’s Catholic bishops that was also critical of Fiducia supplicans, the Russian Orthodox statement amounts to a resounding rejection not only of the disciplinary developments Fiducia permitted, but of its entire rationale. The Russians, however, could perhaps be safely ignored—to say it with Pope Francis—as “Putin’s lap dog[s.]” But Pope Francis can’t ignore the Coptic Orthodox Church or Pope Tawadros II, their leader, who sits in the See of St. Mark and is the only other Christian leader legitimately to style himself as Francis does.
One reason this development represents real disaster is that—arguably—Pope Francis has done more to foster relations with the Coptic Orthodox than anyone else in history.
Pope Francis’s decision to recognize the Coptic Orthodox Church’s canonization of twenty-one Coptic Martyrs of Libya was really and truly historic, as was the Divine Liturgy that Pope Tawadros II celebrated in Rome’s cathedral archbasilica of St. John Lateran, both while Tawadros was in Rome for a visit that would have been momentous even without those events.
It’s tough to say exactly how bad this turn over Fiducia supplicans really is, but to say that things had been going well between the Catholic Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church would put one in the running for Understatement of the Millennium, so this is really bad.
Why would Pope Francis blow up his own legacy? Answering that question isn’t tough; it is impossible.
In order to begin the work of answering it, one must be willing to psychologize. For Pope Francis, it’s personal.
“No one is scandalized if I give a blessing to an entrepreneur who perhaps exploits people: and this is a very serious sin,” Pope Francis told Italy’s weekly Credere in February 2024, “while they are scandalized if I give it to a homosexual: This is hypocrisy!”
The thing is, exactly no one was scandalized by the notion of a pope or anyone else giving a blessing to a homosexual. That happens all the time. But Fiducia supplicans calls for the blessing of persons in homosexual relationships who appear as couples and does so by inventing a phantomatic category of “non-liturgical blessings” that somehow—magically?—only bless the persons who are in the union but not the union itself.
The reason folks have a hard time wrapping their heads around that is that it makes no sense.
The interview with Credere was the second that Pope Francis gave in as many weeks to friendly outlets willing to assist him in what appeared to be a sort of Fiducia supplicans damage control tour, the first being to La Stampa (where his comms guy, Andrea Tornielli, long had a home).
There, Pope Francis said, “The Gospel is to sanctify everyone.” Nobody could possibly argue with that. “Of course,” Francis also said, “there must be good will.” Of course.
“And it is necessary to give precise instructions on the Christian life,” Pope Francis went on to say, adding parenthetically that “it is not the union that is blessed, but the persons.”
“[W]e are all sinners,” Pope Francis added, right again.
“Why,” Pope Francis asked, “should we make a list of sinners who can enter the Church and a list of sinners who cannot be in the Church?” We shouldn’t.
Why not?
“This is not the Gospel.”
Nope, it’s not.
Pope Francis, in other words, views this entire controversy through the lens of his person. He takes it to be a species of referendum on his personal pastoral inclinations, commitments, and decisions.
Thing is, this isn’t really about any of that.
Like many in the Catholic fold—including the Latin bishops of an entire continent and an entire autocephalous Eastern Church, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church—the Coptic Orthodox Church received Fiducia supplicans as a radical departure not only from Christian doctrine, but from sound anthropology and, frankly, common sense.
This isn’t personal, but it is about personnel.
Pope Francis chose an unready and morally compromised favorite, Victor Manuel Cardinal Fernandez, to lead the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Francis gave Fernandez a broad mandate essentially to “make a mess” theologically and otherwise, but not to meddle in matters of law and justice. Mission: accomplished.
Pope Francis could go a long way toward fixing this particular mess by declaring Fiducia supplicans to be what it almost is in fact: a dead letter. He could get a good way further by firing Fernandez. Francis is highly unlikely to do either of those things, because to do either of those things would be to admit at least tacitly that he made a mistake.
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