Fr Mark Montebello vindicated: Pope suggests gay unions can be blessed

Pope Francis has suggested that priests can find ways to bless same-sex unions without breaching church dogma in his response to five conservative cardinals who challenged him to affirm church teaching on homosexuality.

The Vatican on Monday published a letter Francis wrote to the cardinals on 11 July after receiving a list of five questions, or dubia, from the cardinals a day earlier. In it, Francis suggests that such blessings could be studied if they did not confuse the blessing with sacramental marriage.

The letter was published just two days before the start of a major three-week synod at the Vatican at which LGBTIQ+ Catholics and their place in the church are on the agenda.

The Pope’s suggestion that LGBTIQ unions can be blessed vindicates Maltese Dominican friar Mark Montebello who stirred controversy in 2015 after he blessed an engagement of a gay couple.

Montebello had first expressed his willingness to bless same sex unions long before the introduction of civil partnerships in 2014, and marriage equality in 2017.

In an interview with MaltaToday in 2005 he had already made it clear that he would not refrain from blessing the union of same sex couples if he was asked to do so.

“I would bless them. Of course, I can’t celebrate a same sex marriage as that is against Church rules.  But I would give them a blessing,” he had told MaltaToday.

Subsequently Montebello was banned for six months from speaking on Church issues, morals, ethics and faith by former archbishop Joseph Mercieca.

After photos of Fr Montebello blessing the rings during the engagement ceremony were uploaded on Facebook in 2015, Archbishop Charles Scicluna had requested a meeting with Montebello and the Provincial of the Dominican Order, Fr Frans Micallef.

During the meeting the Archbishop encouraged Montebello to continue his outreach to LGBTIQ+ people, while asking him to continue to follow Church practice and discipline in his ministry, “especially in the celebration of sacred rites and Church rituals.”

In comments on the church media the Archbishop had praised Montebello for his outreach to the LGBTIQ community and reiterated church teachings that the ritual of the blessing of rings in engagement and wedding ceremonies were reserved for couples formed by a man and a woman.

In his new letter, Pope Francis reiterated that matrimony is a union between a man and a woman. But responding to the cardinals’ question about same sex unions and blessings, he said “pastoral charity” required patience and understanding, and priests could not become judges “who only deny, reject and exclude”.

“For this reason, pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are forms of benediction, requested by one or more persons, that do not transmit a mistaken conception of marriage,” he wrote. “Because when a benediction is requested, it is expressing a request for help from God, a plea to be able to live better, a trust in a father who can help us to live better.”

While upholding church teachings against same sex marriages Francis’ response to the cardinals, is being considered to be a departure from the Vatican’s official position with the National Catholic Reporter describing the Pope's latest as “an abrupt and intentional shift” from a March 2021 decree issued by the Vatican's doctrinal office — with the pope's approval — explicitly forbidding priests from blessing same-sex unions, with the justification that God “cannot bless sin.”

Francis added there was no need for dioceses or bishops’ conferences to turn such pastoral charity into fixed norms or protocols, saying the issue could be dealt with on a case-by-case basis “because the life of the church runs on channels beyond norms”.

Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, which promotes Church outreach to LGBT Catholics, said that while the response was not a “full-fledged, ringing endorsement” of such blessings, it was very welcomed.

In a statement DeBernardo said the Pope's words implied “that the church does indeed recognise that holy love can exist between same-gender couples, and the love of these couples mirrors the love of God”.

Despite the Catholic Church's current prohibition against blessings for same-sex couples, the Catholic bishops of Belgium published guidelines in September that included a prayer and blessing for same-sex unions, while distinguishing them from sacramental marriage. In March, Catholic bishops in Germany had voted to approve plans for same-sex blessings, and last month several priests in Cologne held a public blessing of gay couples in defiance of their diocese's conservative leader.