Rome’s Concordat

A few months ago, I predicted that the Francis pontificate would seek to establish cordial relations with the Rainbow Reich. (See “While We’re At It,” January 2024, composed late November 2023.) In mid-December the Vatican issued the declaration Fiducia Supplicans, vindicating my assessment of the present regime in Rome. The document provides urgent restatements of Catholic teaching on marriage and sexual morality, which of course proscribe gay unions and gay sex. But Fiducia Supplicans advertises itself as a “specific and innovative contribution to the pastoral meaning of blessings.” Its purportedly groundbreaking insights allow the “non-ritualized” blessing of couples in “irregular situations,” a category that includes gay couples. In intent and effect, the new teaching offers a fig leaf to the sexual revolution.

Viewed in terms of the history of moral theology, the teachings of Fiducia Supplicans on priestly blessings recapitulate the perennial debate between rigorism and probabilism, although in a muddy, pastoral way. Under this framework, the document admits of a narrow reading that minimizes (or even eliminates) any suggestion of changes in the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage and sexual morality. Cardinal Müller makes a good case that, even read charitably, Fiducia Supplicans goes beyond probabilism into error. I agree, but my point is different. Whatever one’s assessment of the finer points of moral theology, the notion that nothing important is changed by Fiducia Supplicans ignores ecclesial and social realities.

You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the winds are blowing in this pontificate. During his reign, Pope Benedict XVI established a presumptive permission to celebrate the Extraordinary Form of the Mass (the traditional Latin Mass). Pope Francis reversed this ruling in Traditionis Custodes. Aside from narrowly circumscribed situations, priests are now prohibited from celebrating the traditional Latin Mass. Rome can grant special permission, but I’m told the requests are routinely denied.

The reverse has now happened when it comes to the Church’s relation to the sexual revolution. Neither John Paul II nor Benedict XVI made concessions to the LGBTQ juggernaut that has brought gay “marriage” to the West. John Paul II underscored the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts. Pope Benedict urged greater scrutiny of seminarians to exclude those with a homosexual orientation. The broad prohibition against any appearance of accommodation to the Rainbow Reich was plain to even the casual observer. The details of moral theology as they apply to Fiducia Supplicans admit of a range of interpretations, as I note above. But the general implications are obvious. A clarifying document was issued in early January by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which had issued Fiducia Supplicans. It allows that a bishop may use his judgment concerning local conditions and impose strict criteria for blessings of same-sex couples. But the clarification insists that bishops cannot enact a “total or definitive denial of this path [of blessing same-sex couples] that is proposed to priests.”

Note well: Under Pope Francis, bishops are expressly denied the authority to prevent their priests from offering blessings to same-sex couples, even as they are denied the authority to permit their priests to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass. Ordinary Catholics, progressive, conservative, and in between, are not stupid. They can see what is being indulged, encouraged, and rewarded—and what is being discouraged, chastised, and punished. The pattern is clear. Team Francis bends over backward to accommodate “new realities,” while never tiring of wielding rhetorical truncheons against the “rigid” and “backward-looking” folks who are not keen to sell the apostolic inheritance for the pottage of relevance. Bishops and priests are all the more attentive to these signs of papal intention, for they must live out their vocations under strictures laid out by Rome.

So Fiducia Supplicans did not surprise me in the least. Nor did it surprise any but the most naive bishops and priests. Nevertheless, it has sparked remarkable dissent, perhaps because it makes explicit an unhappy reality: a long-established, well recognized pattern of cultural accommodation. From the Archbishop of Montevideo, Uruguay to the Archbishop of Nairobi, Kenya, statements have been issued that, in one way or another, amount to a rejection of the substance and implications of the latest teaching of Pope Francis. Fiducia Supplicans brings into the open a general trend of this pontificate. Rome wants to negotiate a concordat with the sexual revolution. Many Catholics are resisting, and I expect the backlash to grow. The Dutch episcopacy, which a generation ago was at the forefront of theological liberalization, has quietly cold-shouldered Fiducia Supplicans; some French bishops have instructed priests that they may bless homosexual individuals (as was already the case), but not homosexual couples.

Another sign of the true import of Fiducia Supplicans is the fact that progressive Catholics likewise sense that the document opens the way for accommodation with the sexual mores of the West. Church authorities in Germany, Austria, Belgium, and elsewhere in Western Europe are eager to make ever greater concessions to the sexual revolution. They toss aside the caution expressed in the magisterial document, which emphasizes discernment of particular situations and circumstances. A recent statement by a group of European bishops says that priests must bless same-sex couples when asked. In these circles, the Church is positively required to use its sacred authority to buttress the Rainbow Reich.

I doubt Pope Francis was happy when he learned that Fr. James Martin had used Fiducia Supplicans as warrant to invite a reporter and photographer to cover his blessing of two men holding hands. But the Argentine pope should not have been surprised. The document he endorsed puts an exclamation point on a wide array of statements, gestures, and actions that encourage the Church to pivot to a friendly stance toward the sexual revolution, one willing to probe from points of comity and cooperation—the basis for a concordat.

Many ironies surround Fiducia Supplicans. Francis portrays himself as the pope of the peripheries. Yet the gay agenda epitomizes the preoccupations of the rich West. The farther one goes from Washington and Brussels, the more intense the opposition to the spirit and letter of this purported “development.”

Another irony: The Francis pontificate has expended a great deal of rhetorical energy playing up “synodality.” Church resources have been devoted to a process that claims to “hear all voices” and discern new and more consultative ways of conducting church affairs. Yet Fiducia Supplicans was drafted without input from other dicasteries, to say nothing of the College of Cardinals and other leaders of the far-flung Catholic Church. Furthermore, even a casual appraisal of the argument for this new “development” of the pastoral theology of blessing reveals a strange, indeed bizarre self-referentiality. Fiducia Supplicans draws primarily on previous statements by Pope Francis. The document relies on a sui generis appeal to papal authority that would make Pius IX blush: The development of pastoral theology by Pope Francis is authoritative because of the authoritative statements of Pope Francis.

Yet another irony: Those who claim that Pope Francis advances a countercultural view of the environment, migration, and the “marginalized” are either deluded or mendacious, since what he says about these issues largely corresponds with what one hears in the halls of Harvard, Google’s boardroom, and other bastions of elite progressivism. The current regime in Rome cheered Covid lockdowns, promotes climate activism, rejects measures to prevent mass migration, uses therapeutic language, and echoes DEI nostrums in official documents. Now, with the promulgation of Fiducia Supplicans, Pope Francis has steered the Church toward a concordat with the Rainbow Reich. In almost every respect, Francis oversees a Curia that is in sync with the richest and most powerful people in the West on many issues—and when not in sync, is careful not to contradict elite dogmas. (To do so would make one “rigid” and “backward-looking.”) It’s plain that Francis has erected a Davos pontificate, as thoroughly captured by secular interests as were the Renaissance popes.

Sow the wind; reap the whirlwind. Major sectors of the Catholic Church in Belgium, Germany, and other rich-world nations have already embraced the Rainbow Reich, in deed if not always in word. Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg intones platitudes about our purported new understandings of homosexuality. Lay leaders of the German Synodal Way sound like women’s studies professors at Tufts. In my estimation, it is as close to certain as any prediction of the future that these jurisdictions will find ways to affirm and bless the sexual revolution tout court—not just homosexuality, but abortion and artificial means of reproduction, too, as well as the closely related practice of doctor-assisted suicide. Two hundred years ago, these churches were chaplaincies to a counterrevolutionary elite. In the twenty-first century, they are reverting to type, only this time elites are secular proponents of a world remade by the sexual revolution and its promise to free us from our bodies.

Catholicism has changed since the Congress of Vienna. It is now a global Church, not a European one. I will venture another prediction. The erratic, anti-traditional, and authoritarian Francis pontificate will destroy the modern imperial papacy and usher in a less centralized, more federalized church. When Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae in 1968, he was trying to use papal authority to shore up traditional teaching. He failed, and in failing, he created conditions for the craziness of the 1970s. Progressives of all sorts—theological, moral, and liturgical—saw that, though they were de jure limited, they were de facto free to do as they pleased.

With Fiducia Supplicans, Pope Francis imposes novelty by papal fiat. Past behavior suggests that he will respond to resistance with naked exercises of papal power. The effect will be to discredit the concentration of power in Rome, epitomized by Vatican I’s declaration of papal infallibility and realized in the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which incorporated the Church’s life into a single legal system subject to papal oversight and discretion. The federalization is already happening. Pope Francis made an exception for China, forsaking the right to appoint bishops there. He’ll likely do the same for Germany. In the United States, his effort to limit and eventually eliminate the traditional Latin Mass is being met with quiet noncompliance. Now, African bishops and many others are rejecting Fiducia Supplicans.

Thus a final irony: Pope Francis is creating a synodal church of sorts, not by means of round tables and “sharing,” but through imperious methods that arouse dissent. He is battering the church into more autonomous fragments. This new form of church (not entirely remote from what was envisioned by some at Vatican II) may be less coordinated, less coherent. But it will be more attentive to local realities—and thus less easily captured by the Davos elite, a very positive outcome. God writes straight with crooked lines. Historians may look back on the strange career of Jorge Bergoglio, one marked by a genius for institutional turmoil and destruction, and discern the wry smile of God’s providence.