“No one is scandalized if I give a blessing to an entrepreneur who perhaps exploits people: and this is a very serious sin. Whereas they are scandalized if I give it to a homosexual… This is hypocrisy!”
Details, from Vatican News:
“Everyone, everyone,” Pope Francis said in Lisbon at the 2023 World Youth Day in August, and repeated on numerous other occasions to reiterate the principle of welcome at the heart of the Church’s pastoral mission.
Likewise, he said it to describe spontaneous blessings of individuals who are in so-called “irregular” relationships, including homosexual ones, as taken into account by the Vatican’s doctrinal document Fiducia supplicans which was issued in December.
In his interview with the Italian weekly magazine Credere, a periodical of the San Paolo Group, which will be published in the issue on Thursday, 8 February, Pope Francis also returned to the theme of such blessings, which have generated various reactions and controversies, and repeated what he had already mentioned in his audience with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith that drafted the declaration.
“I do not bless a ‘homosexual marriage’; I bless two people who love each other, and I also ask them to pray for me,” the Pope explained in his conversation with Credere‘s editor Don Vincenzo Vitale.
“Always in confessions, when these situations arrive—homosexual people, remarried people—I always pray and bless. The blessing is not to be denied to anyone. Everyone, everyone. Mind you, I am talking about people: those who are capable of receiving Baptism.”
“The gravest sins,” the Pope adds, “are those that disguise themselves with a more ‘angelic’ appearance. No one is scandalised if I give a blessing to an entrepreneur who perhaps exploits people: and this is a very serious sin. Whereas they are scandalised if I give it to a homosexual… This is hypocrisy! We must all respect each other. Everyone! The heart of the document is welcome.”
