(LifeSiteNews) — Father Gerald Murray strongly rebuked Pope Francis’ document endorsing homosexual “blessings” and encouraged Catholics to “reject this innovation” on Raymond Arroyo’s The World Over on Thursday.
The respected canon lawyer and New York pastor said that Fiducia Supplicans, authored by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), and approved by Pope Francis in December, contains “heretical teachings” and blasted the text’s “horrible” acceptance of “blessings” for homosexual “couples.”
“Cardinal Fernández has not upheld the Catholic faith with Fiducia Supplicans,” Murray said. “And the pope has not upheld the Catholic faith with Fiducia Supplicans.”
“What’s inevitably going to happen here is that the Catholic bishops and faithful of the world have to tell the Holy See, ‘We do not believe that immorality is blessable, and therefore we reject this innovation,’” he declared. “This innovation of a blessing of what’s immoral will not stand.”
“And that’s got to be quite crystal clear to Pope Francis and the others.”
“And that’s an act of charity, by the way,” the priest noted. “If the pope or any of his assistants make a mistake, to keep your mouth shut and pretend they’re right is wrong. To tell them with charity, but with forthrightness, you’ve made a mistake here, Holy Father… that’s the charity that Saint Paul showed to Saint Peter.”
‘There are heretical teachings contained in Fiducia Supplicans’
Fr. Murray defended recent comments made by former Vatican liturgy chief Cardinal Robert Sarah, who repudiated Fiducia Supplicans and suggested that it proposes a “heresy that gravely undermines the Church, the Body of Christ, because it is contrary to the Catholic faith and tradition.”
READ: Cardinal Sarah strongly rejects Fiducia Supplicans, ‘heresy’ of same-sex ‘blessings’
In a particularly strong statement this week, the eminent Guinean cardinal said that the faithful should not even enter “into discussion” with Fiducia Supplicans and endorsed many bishops’ conferences “firm opposition” to it, calling for further resistance to the text from “national or regional episcopal conferences and each bishop.”
“Cardinal Sarah is expressing the common opinion of people who look at this document and compare it with what’s been taught by every pope up till this moment and saying that this is not true,” Murray remarked. “There are heretical teachings contained in Fiducia Supplicans.”
“So, sad to say, the pope has approved something that he never should have, because it teaches wrongly that the Catholic Church considers homosexual ‘couples’ a worthy subject to receive a blessing, as ‘couples.’ That is horrible,” the priest said.
“That’s teaching, basically, that the mortal sin committed by homosexuals is not a big deal and, in fact, they deserve a blessing,” he continued, criticizing the document for describing homosexuals as “couples” and falsely equating them with married and engaged couples.
“They’re not couples,” Murray said. “They’re two people who are misusing their bodies with each other. This has nothing to do with how a couple is conceived in Catholic theology.”
“They’re not couples,” Murray said. “They’re two people who are misusing their bodies with each other. This has nothing to do with how a couple is conceived in Catholic theology.”
According to Catholic teaching, “couple” refers specifically to a man and a woman, and homosexual relationships do not bear any resemblance whatsoever to legitimate relationships, even remotely.
In Ecclesia in Europa, Pope St. John Paul II criticized “attempts… to accept a definition of the couple in which difference of sex is not considered essential.”
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 2003 document condemning same-sex civil unions likewise states, “There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”
Such “unions” are “totally lacking in the biological and anthropological elements of marriage and family” and “the conjugal dimension, which represents the human and ordered form of sexuality,” adds the document, approved by St. John Paul II.
READ: Mother Miriam: Catholics who support LGBT movement are ‘on the way to hell’
‘We have to be very frank and blunt here’
Murray dismissed attacks against Cardinal Sarah by scandal-plagued papal biographer and propagandist Austen Ivereigh, who claimed that the conservative prelate should “resign” for denouncing Fiducia Supplicans as heretical.
“Cardinal Sarah’s only done his duty as a cardinal to uphold the Catholic faith,” the New York priest said.
“We have to be very frank and blunt here, that all of these bishops in Africa are not mistaken in what they understand this document to mean,” he insisted, pointing to pro-LGBT priest Father James Martin “blessing” two “married” homosexuals immediately after the release of Fiducia Supplicans.
“You’ll recall that Father James Martin, a day after this came out, had his picture in The New York Times – there was a reporter conveniently invited – when he blessed two homosexuals, who we find out are civilly ‘married,’” Murray related. “So, here are two people who are living in an immoral relationship, who explicitly reject Catholic doctrine by the way they live, and now they’re being blessed?”
When you see that – being done by a priest, by the way – no wonder the bishops in the world are looking at us and [saying], “Wait a minute, when in the history of the Catholic Church did we ever say God will favor people who commit unnatural sex acts with each other, consider themselves to be married, and we’re just going to give them a blessing as if they were married, all the while saying, ‘We’re not really blessing their union because the union is different than a couple.'” Nonsense.
“When people are deluded and think they’re married, we shouldn’t contribute to that delusion by this nonsense of blessing them,” he said.
“What’s really at stake here is, does the Catholic Church consider homosexual activity – sodomy – to be a mortal sin?” Murray stressed. “Do people who promise to commit this sin with each other on an ongoing basis, are they blessable in that promise, in that relationship?”
“The Vatican has said yes. The Vatican may deny it by saying, ‘We don’t bless unions, we only bless couples.’ That’s double-talk,” he charged.
READ: Priest to Pope Francis: ‘You are hurting my parish’ by promoting homosexuality
The Catholic Church condemns homosexual activity as “intrinsically disordered,” gravely sinful, and a “sin that cries to heaven,” in accordance with Sacred Scripture and the constant Tradition of the Church.
The Church also teaches that the homosexual orientation is itself “objectively disordered.”
And though ignored by Pope Francis and other pro-LGBT ecclesial figures, homosexuality carries serious physical harms. Practicing homosexuals face a nearly 30-times higher risk of HIV and a 80-times higher rate of anal cancer, as well as elevated risks of other cancers and STDs.
“The sexually active homosexual population suffers disproportionally from HIV, anal cancer, chlamydia trachomatis, cryptosporidium, microsporidia, gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, hepatitis B and C, genital warts, scabies, HPV, and other conditions,” Catholic pro-family organization Fieles a la Verdad observed. “As a result, the average life expectancy of sexually active homosexual males is reduced by many years.”
READ: Benedict XVI exposed the ‘destructive’ lies of gender ideology and the LGBT movement
Global backlash to Fiducia Supplicans
Pope Francis has taken a permissive approach to LGBT ideology throughout his papacy and repeatedly contradicted Catholic teaching on sexuality, resulting in widespread confusion within the Church.
The Argentinian Jesuit pontiff has endorsed same-sex civil unions on several occasions, in explicit contradiction to Catholic doctrine, which teaches that laws granting legal recognition to homosexual relationships are “gravely unjust.” He previously appeared to authorize priests to “bless” pairs of homosexuals in a letter issued by the DDF in November.
Francis also regularly promotes dissident, pro-homosexual clerics, like Fr. Martin, Cardinal Robert McElroy, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, SJ, and Cardinal Blase Cupich, as well as LGBT activists, pressure groups, and events around the world.
But Fiducia Supplicans has led to an unprecedented wave of backlash against Francis’ pro-LGBT heterodoxy, with more than a dozen bishops’ conferences, mostly in Africa and Eastern Europe, rejecting “blessings” for same-sex “couples” in defiance of the papal document.
On Thursday, the bishops of Africa issued a unified statement declaring that there will be “no blessing for homosexual couples in the African churches.”
Hundreds of priests in the U.S., U.K., and Australia have also repudiated homosexual “blessings” in response to Fiducia Supplicans, as have priestly orders, such as the Congregation of the Marians Fathers of the Immaculate Conception and the Transalpine Redemptorists, high-ranking prelates like Cardinal Gerhard Müller, and numerous diocesan bishops.
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