The Netherlands’ only cardinal, Utrecht Archbishop Willem Eijk, has urged Flemish bishops to withdraw their statement allowing blessings for same-sex couples, saying this undermines Church teaching.
The conservative cardinal said allowing blessings for gay couples barred from a Church wedding meant the Church would have to also bless heterosexual couples living together without being married.
Flemish-speaking bishops in neighbouring Belgium last month backed a blessing ceremony for faithful gay couples, a first in the Catholic world, despite a Vatican ruling last year that God “cannot bless sin”.
“Allowing the blessing of gay couples carries the great risk of devaluing blessings and undermining the Church’s teaching on the morality of marriage and sexual ethics,” Cardinal Eijk wrote in the Italian-based blog New Daily Compass.
Cardinal Eijk disputed the statement's frequent quoting of Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia as justification for their stand, saying the apostolic exhortation actually argued that gays must “come to understand that their relationship goes against God’s order of creation and is therefore morally unacceptable”.
Meanwhile Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp told the German Church’s official website katholisch.de in an interview on 30 September while on a visit to Germany for the plenary of the German Synodal Path initiative where he is an observer that he had discussed the matter of homosexual blessings with Pope Francis and therefore knew what the Pope thought about the issue. Asked how Rome had reacted when in 2015 he had openly come out in favour of blessing homosexual couples, Bonny recalled that he had been called to Rome where he had openly stated that he was in favour of blessing homosexual couples. “I also spoke to Pope Francis personally at the time and therefore know what he thinks about the issue, so I know that our guidelines for homosexual blessings are in line with Pope Francis. The Pope underlined that we bishops are individually responsible and that he supports that individual episcopal responsibility. I would add that he does not have to record everything [he says] on paper.”
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