OTTAWA, Ontario (LifeSiteNews) — Canadian priest Father Mark Goring delivered a warning to Catholic bishops promoting “blessings” for “sinful partnership situations,” urging them to repent so that they do not “perish eternally.”
“There’s a handful of bishops out there, and you guys seem to be authorizing or allowing the blessing of sinful partnership situations,” Father Goring noted in a September 10 video that has gone viral.
“You need to repent. You need to repent so that you can save your soul and not perish eternally,” insisted the priest, who has become known for defending Catholic teaching.
He further accused the heterodox bishops of fomenting schism.
“You’re causing schism in the Church,” Goring charged. “You’re supposed to be accompanying people into conversion” and “calling people to repentance, not blessing sinful partnership situations.”
The Ottawa priest and member of the Companions of the Cross concluded by quoting Ezekiel 33:7-9, which was the first reading at Mass on Sunday, September 10:
So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked man, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way; he shall die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your life.
Despite clear Catholic teaching on the subject, a growing number of bishops, often appointed by Pope Francis, have endorsed “blessings” for same-sex unions and other gravely sinful sexual partnerships.
Last month, Archbishop Heiner Koch of Berlin announced in a letter to clergy and diocesan employees that he will allow priests to “bless” relationships of homosexuals and divorced and “remarried” couples without penalty.
Koch cited a resolution approved by the German “Synodal Way” earlier this year in support of such “blessings.” The bishops of Germany voted in favor of the document 38-9, with 11 abstaining. Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, who pushed for the resolution, has admitted that he has personally “blessed” homosexual unions.
In his letter, Koch also pointed to Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia and recent comments made by Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernández, the new head of the Dicastery (formerly Congregation) for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF).
Fernández, who Pope Francis appointed to lead the DDF in June, suggested in an interview the following month that the Church could eventually approve “blessings” for sinful relationships. “Now, if a blessing is given in such a way that it does not cause that confusion, it will have to be analyzed and confirmed,” the Argentine prelate said.
Pope Francis named him a cardinal days later.
In September 2022, the bishops of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, published a document endorsing “blessings” ceremonies for homosexual partners. Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp has repeatedly claimed that Pope Francis did not oppose the Flemish bishops’ decision.
The Vatican has not taken action against the German or Belgian bishops for approving “blessings” of illicit unions.
READ: Italian priest performs nation’s first same-sex ‘blessing’ in diocese of Francis-appointed cardinal
In February 2021, however, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith unequivocally condemned same-sex “blessings” in a responsum ad dubium, declaring that “it is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage.”
“For the above mentioned reasons, the Church does not have, and cannot have, the power to bless unions of persons of the same sex,” the text affirmed, stressing that God “does not and cannot bless sin.” Several heterodox prelates criticized the document after its publication, including Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna.
The Catholic Church teaches that all sexual activity outside of marriage is gravely sinful and that homosexuality is “disordered” and an “intrinsic moral evil,” in accordance with Sacred Scripture and the constant Tradition of the Church.
READ: French priest: Pope Francis approved my blessing of homosexual couples