Clearly, Fiducia supplicans does not go as far as many LGBTQ advocates would like. The permissions it grants fall far short of the kinds of public blessings approved, for example, by the German and Flemish bishops’ conferences. Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss this doctrinal declaration—the first since 2000’s Dominus Jesus—as inconsequential, as some Catholics, both liberal and conservative, have already done.
For starters, the document really does offer a “real development from what has been said about blessings up until now,” allowing for a broader, richer understanding of the practice, one less tied to ritual and liturgical formulas and more receptive to the free outpouring of the Holy Spirit. As Fiducia supplicans explains, the unprompted outpouring of divine grace cannot be limited to the sacraments or the liturgy alone: “the world needs blessings,” and the fact that these newly permitted blessings cannot occur within a ritual context does not make them any less powerful as expressions of God’s abiding love for all people, including same-sex couples: “every brother and every sister will be able to feel that, in the Church, they are always pilgrims, always beggars, always loved, and, despite everything, always blessed.”
Francis’s critics often complain that the pope’s gentler, more “pastoral” approach to neuralgic ecclesial issues like same-sex relationships creates confusion and sows division. Fiducia supplicans, written with doctrinal precision and spiritual charity, does neither. It affirms, rightly, what too many Catholics often forget: that the Church is not primarily a redoubt for the perfect, but a community of flawed human beings humbly committed to serving a merciful God. It should therefore be as generous as possible in dispensing blessings, and less anxious about the purity of those who receive them.