When you thought all Pope Francis had in mind for this coming week was the traditional midnight Mass at the Vatican, the pontiff had something else up his sleeve.

One day after Francis turned 87, the Vatican dropped a bomb — a major victory for the progressive leaders of Europe’s shrinking Catholic churches who want to march forward with efforts to modernize Catholicism. How will bishops respond in the growing churches of Africa, Asia and the Global South?

As GetReligion has stressed, this story has been hiding in clear sight in Germany for more than a year — while receiving little or no coverage. Now, it is time for America’s most powerful newsrooms to ramp up their headlines.

Starting with the Washington Post’s 66-word lede:

ROME — The Vatican on Monday issued formal, definitive permission for Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples, as long as those benedictions are kept separate from marriage, a decree that amounts to an about-face after decades of discord between the LBGTQ+ community and the Catholic Church, which has long upheld that homosexuals are “disordered” and said any nod to their unions would be tantamount to blessing sin.

The guidance from the powerful Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued after papal review and approval, largely reverses a 2021 ruling and expands on a far briefer statement of support for such blessings issued by Francis in September in response to questions raised by conservative clerics.

In other words, Pope Francis has been signaling for some time that some sort of approval for same-sex blessings was coming down the pike. No one expected him to choose the week before Christmas to do so.

One has to wonder why Francis didn’t give his bishops more of a heads up as to when this was going to happen. Here they’re coming into one of the busiest liturgical weeks of the year and the last thing they need is a major doctrinal switcheroo like this to land in their laps.

Couples in “irregular situations” as well as “couples of the same sex” may receive priestly blessings, the Vatican said, so that these “human relationships may mature and grow in fidelity to the Gospel.”

And what are these “irregular situations?” Divorce? Divorce and remarriage outside the laws of the church? Cohabitating couples? Big recipe for confusion here.