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.

There’s a lot to take in. Noticing a huge silence on the part of various bishops on social media in reaction to the papal pronouncement, Catholic blogger Amy Welborn said it for all the laity out there:

Whassup?

Judging by their silence on Twitter/X feeds, I’m guessing the papal pronouncement came as a surprise to the bishops, too. Were I one of these men in red hats, I’d be furious. They’re made to look like fools. The laity are wondering: Is this a change in doctrine or not?

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops put out a statement saying that no, it actually was not, because same-sex unions were not considered marriage but that “anyone can ask for a blessing when they are seeking God's assistance, mercy and grace.” What does this mean? Is this something like bringing up a pet for a blessing during an annual St. Francis Day service?

Most others saw it as a major shift in doctrine, including the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit and LGBTQ+ advocate who is editor-at-large for America magazine and someone whose ministry has been openly praised by Pope Francis. He wrote on Twitter:

Be wary of the "Nothing has changed" response to today's news. It's a significant change. In short, yesterday, as a priest, I was forbidden to bless same-sex couples at all. Today, with some limitations, I can.

Moreover, he added on another tweet that the papal declaration is a huge shift from:

…the conclusion ‘God does not and cannot bless sin’ from just two years ago. The declaration opens the door to non-liturgical blessings for same-sex couples, something that had been previously off limits for bishops, priests and deacons.

Other accounts, such as the Wall Street Journal had brief articles with no details on the back-door intrigues that led up to this point, as if the news had taken them unprepared as well.

The front-page New York Times piece had a much fuller account but — surprise — in also contained some brazen editorializing, such as:

Indeed, the heart of the new declaration, “Fiducia Supplicans: On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings,” is a resistance to a rigid church, one that excludes people from blessings because they fail doctrinal or moral litmus tests, but also one that turns blessings — including to same-sex couples — into another suffocating formality. Francis wants most of all a spontaneity and closeness to the faithful that he considers vital to the church’s survival.

The Vatican could have hardly hoped for a better press release than that paragraph from the newsroom that many journalists look to for guidance.

The Times did get some conservative reacts in a separate story by two staff writers based in the United States. Interestingly, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, whom they quoted, insisted that the ruling didn’t change Catholic doctrine a whit. However:

“…some Catholic leaders worried that the guidance could create awkwardness for priests who declined a request from a gay couple as a matter of conscience.

Young priests in the United States are overwhelmingly conservative, even more so than the older cohort of bishops who lead them, setting up the possibility of conflicts in individual parishes and dioceses.

“I will never confer a blessing upon two men or two women who are involved in a sexual relationship that is by its nature gravely sinful,” said the Rev. Gerald Murray, the pastor at Holy Family Church in New York and an outspoken conservative. “The pope has placed priests who uphold Catholic doctrine about the immorality of sodomy and adultery into a terrible position.”

(A tangent here: It’s been 20 years since the Rev. Gene Robinson was elected the first gay bishop in the Episcopal Church and I attended his consecration in November 2003 in New Hampshire. At the time, conservative Episcopal clergy were worried that as more bishops sympathetic to Robinson were elected, they’d be pressured to compromise or leave. Within six years –- it only took that long -– many had left.)

As I often do with Catholic pieces, I invite the reader to turn to The Pillar, the website that seems to have more of the story as to what’s really happening in Rome than anyone else does. There’s several articles on the site about what on Earth Pope Francis is up to and what his long game really is, here.

The most interesting piece is about papal power and how this new same-sex ruling undermines the power of the bishops.

Sources close to several African bishops told The Pillar that the episcopate there is “in a state of shock” and “appalled” by the notion that same sex couples could present themselves for any kind of blessing of their relationship.

But perhaps the most consequential and ecclesiologically significant of the declaration’s provisions is not the disunity it is already causing among bishops in different parts of the world, but that it seems to preclude any scope for resolving it. 

The text of Fiducia supplicans says that no further clarifications on the issue can be expected from the DDF. But, perhaps more significantly, the declaration also seeks to prevent the bishops themselves from bringing clarity and order to its implementation in their dioceses.

In short, the article goes on to explain, priests can bless whomever they want, however they want, without getting approval from their bishop. So, a priest could run a veritable gay blessing chapel out of his church and his bishop can’t do a thing about it. And what about nations in which many bishops want to move forward, post haste?

If this sounds like pastoral chaos, it well could be.

All this is great grist for a religion reporter’s mill. I’m guessing the tensions will stay hidden for a time but they’ll eventually seep out. Things to watch out for: Couples getting “blessed” and posting the photos online; priests refusing to do such blessings; bishops trying to make some public statement about it all to bewildered parishioners.

Even though the Vatican may spin these blessings as nothing to see here, the laity are smarter than that. They know there’s plenty to see here for those who care to look.