I’ve never kissed my husband during Mass. 

Most of the other married couples around us give each other a quick peck on the lips during the rite of peace, when congregants are invited to greet each other with a physical gesture. In most cases, these gestures differ based on the intimacy level of those involved: a kiss on the cheek for an old friend, a handshake for someone whose face you recognize, a pantomimed peace sign for a stranger. Or, in our case, an awkward, emotionless, one-armed hug, complete with a friendly pat on the back. We are careful not to allow any body parts but our shoulders and palms to touch and only for the briefest of moments.

For those not in support of gay marriage, we reason, a kiss between two men might seem to be a political act, a gesture of protest, especially in the context of a Catholic Mass. Instead of passing without notice like the dozens of other kisses given and received during Mass, our kiss might be interpreted as being up to something. Whereas a heterosexual kiss simply is, a homosexual kiss means. And it is that meaning that Andy and I try to avoid by greeting each other the way two straight colleagues might greet each other at an after-hours function at a local bar.

Not that we’re good at keeping our secret. Two men in their late thirties with fashion sense and moisturized skin, who show up and leave together, side-hugging each other while saving room for the Holy Spirit…. Most folks puzzle it out. So do most priests. The ones who know us—like the priest who confirmed me, my parish priest, or the Augustinians on the campus of Villanova where I teach—don’t have to do any guesswork.

Things are different for the priests we meet during our travels. Whenever we visit a new city, we make time to see its churches. Last summer, we were visiting St. Anne’s in Quebec City and asked the priest to bless the holy water we planned to bring to our goddaughter’s baptism a few weeks later. I also asked the priest to say a blessing for my dissertation, which I was in the thick of. I’m a glutton for blessings, and I wanted to keep asking for them. But because I was standing with my husband, and because blessing gay people has become an ecclesiological controversy, I politely thanked the priest and went away without receiving the blessing I’d hoped for. This is likely not how Christ wants people leaving the presence of his ministers. As paragraph 33 of Fiducia supplicans reads, “God never turns away anyone who approaches Him!”

Released by the Vatican in late 2023, the Declaration instructs priests on how to impart non-liturgical blessings on people in same-sex marriages and other “irregular situations,” like that of yours truly. While containing some inspiring theological claims, like “The great blessing of God is Jesus Christ” and “those seeking a blessing should not be required to have moral perfection,” the declaration nevertheless seems written to reinforce very stubborn ideas: that there is a proper place for liturgy and that married gay people do not belong there. 

Apart from neglecting the realities that many married gay people already live and move and have our liturgical being inside the Church and that no one can change that, these claims are also theologically suspect. Not only do they create a hierarchy of blessings (real liturgical ones versus non-liturgical consolation prizes), but without even realizing it, they drive a wedge between liturgy and life, between the Church and the world, between the places of true blessing and those parts of creation that a panel of Church authorities has decided take place apart from the blessing of God.

Fiducia supplicans wants to be as clear as possible about what is and is not liturgy: “Rites and prayers that could create confusion between what constitutes marriage—which is the ‘exclusive, stable, and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the generation of children’—and what contradicts it are inadmissible.” A priest may “spontaneously” bless a person in a same-sex relationship, but the priest (and presumably also the ones being blessed?) must take every precaution to “avoid any form of confusion or scandal,” which might result if the blessing is “imparted in concurrence with the ceremonies of a civil union,” or “performed with any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding.”

So married gay people can be blessed but not their unions, and only if they “do not claim a legitimation of their own status.” But what constitutes such a claim? Isn’t such a legitimation implicit in the very decision to get and stay married? Does the document mean that married gay people can only be blessed if we believe our marriages are fake?

Like many of the Vatican’s statements on LGBTQ people, this one seems crafted with the goal of frustrating everyone just a tiny bit, but not so much that droves of us leave the Church. Offer a blessing, it says, but make it clear that it’s in no way liturgical. Accompany gay people on their journey, but only partway. Welcome gays but make it clear that you do not join them in their marital delusions. Pay careful attention to what the couple is wearing. Pay attention to who might be watching. But at the same time, be sure your blessing feels “spontaneous.”

Is this a “new blessing sophistry”? wonders theologian Ingrid Fischer. How many angels can dance during the “few seconds” it takes to utter a non-liturgical blessing? How formulaic can a priest’s spontaneous blessings become before they begin to feel routinized?

All of this nitpicking is off-putting to me, and I imagine it must irk Jesus as well. Jesus is rarely mentioned in Catholic conversations about issues like this, but every time I listen to a bishop or cardinal wax theological on spontaneous versus liturgical blessings, I reflect that this kind of rubricism, this sort of liturgical algebra, doesn’t have any basis in Jesus’ life or ministry. Think about Jesus spontaneously telling a tax collector that salvation has come to his house, spontaneously bouncing children on his lap and proclaiming God’s favor upon them, spontaneously blessing Zacchaeus before even entering his home. Which kind of blessing are we dealing with?

When Jesus teaches us to pray, he doesn’t clarify which of the Fiducia supplicans categories his Our Father fits into. Is it liturgical? We say it during Mass, but surely there was a sort of spontaneity to Jesus’ prayers, even if he tended to repeat himself. Likewise, was he “performing liturgy” when he proclaimed God’s blessings on the poor, the meek, and the disinherited? Are we “performing liturgy” when we bless those who curse us? He no doubt participated in liturgical rites in the temple, but it’s unlikely he saw a distinction between what he did inside the temple and what he did without.

As Edward Schillebeeckx reminds us, in his characteristically shocking way, “Calvary was not a Church liturgy, but an hour of human life, which Jesus experienced as worship.” Salvation was not accomplished by any liturgical act, but by decidedly non-liturgical ones. Following their savior’s lead, Jesus’ early followers were obsessed not first and foremost with the rites of liturgy but with the Kingdom of God.

Of course not everything in the Church can go back to Jesus or the time of the New Testament. Christian teachings and practices evolve, and it’s important that we evolve along with them. But this evolution should be organic and consonant with what comes before. As Christian ethicist William Spohn puts it (echoing a non-canonical Mark Twain saying about history), our acts ought to “rhyme” with Jesus’ own. We walk in the style of Jesus; we grow in the style of Jesus. Our doctrines, customs, liturgies can and must develop, but every single one of them ought to point us back to the crucified and risen Christ. When a priest offers a blessing, the recipient ought to feel God drawing near to them, ought to hear Jesus whispering that the Kingdom is—look!—right here.

To be created is to be blessed. We are only because at every moment we are being sustained by the bountiful blessings of God. Finding ourselves to be so blessed, we offer blessings back to God. We are blessed blessers. This dual movement—receiving the world as gift, offering it to God as gift—is at the heart of the biblical imagination.

In one of the creation stories in Genesis, as Alexander Schmemann points out, humans are depicted as hungry beings, and the world is given to them not merely for food, but for communion. “All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man.” They were not meant to eat simply to stay alive, but to enjoy life with God. Eating was intended not just for life, but for eternal life.

In this original state of creation, the whole world is blessed by God: “All creation [is] the sign and means of his presence and wisdom, love and revelation.” Schmemann says that unlike other aspects of the created world, humans are able to bless God for what they receive from him. “The significant fact about life in the Garden is that man is to name things.” Rather than simply distinguishing, say, elephants from flamingos, the act of naming was a recognition of creation’s blessedness. “To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value God gave to it, to know it as coming from God and to know its place and function within the cosmos created by God.” In short, to name something “is to bless God for it and in it.” Importantly, recognizing God’s blessing and gratefully blessing him in return were not ritual acts, reserved for liturgical ceremonies; they simply emanated from life. They were, to borrow a term from Fiducia supplicans, spontaneous.

Until they weren’t. Whatever else the so-called forbidden fruit might signify, says Schmemann, it was clearly “unlike every other fruit in the Garden: it was not offered as a gift to man. Not given, not blessed by God, it was food whose eating was condemned to be communion with itself alone, and not with God.” To eat this fruit, Schmemann argues, was simply to eat it as food and not something more. The forbidden fruit, then, becomes “the image of the world loved for itself, and eating it is the image of life understood as an end in itself.” And hence, concludes Schmemann: “The only real fall of man is his non-eucharistic life in a non-eucharistic world.”

The fall carves out a special place in the world for blessings. Adam and Eve originally knew no such places. The entire world was blessed, and humanity’s work (the word liturgy comes from ergon, which means “to work”) was to remain aware of its blessed status. In this creative reading of the fall, argues Schmemann, “The sin was not that [Adam] neglected his religious duties. The sin was that he thought of God in terms of religion, i.e. opposing him to life.” It’s not that there was no “liturgy” before the fall. But what the fall introduced was a “liturgical understanding of the liturgy”—of liturgy as something that happens in one place, with God, while the world happens somewhere else, with perhaps a little less God.

There is nothing less Christian than opposing liturgy and life. And yet it is this very distinction that Fiducia supplicans helps reinforce when it warns priests against confusing liturgical blessings with non-liturgical ones:

[I]t is essential to grasp the Holy Father’s concern that these non-ritualized blessings never cease being simple gestures that provide an effective means of increasing trust in God on the part of the people who ask for them, careful that they should not become a liturgical or semi-liturgical act.

On one hand, this statement simply describes the reality that married gay people do not find a place for our marriages inside current liturgical formulas. On the other hand, it establishes a firm line between simple blessings and the liturgy.

But what does God do when such simple blessings are offered? Does he, following the priest’s lead, reach into the bag on his left labeled “non-liturgical blessings” and pull out some special-but-not-too-special glitter to sprinkle down on us? The glitter of “peace, health, a spirit of patience, dialogue and mutual assistance”? Meanwhile, the other bag, the one on his right hand, is the one that contains the Real Blessings, those for marital bliss and spousal fidelity and sacramental love, the ones gay people must not ask for. To confuse the bags would be to risk scandal.

But isn’t this “confusion” actually the very point and promise of the Kingdom? God lavishes his blessings on those who have been judged unworthy. Perhaps the real scandal is in pretending that God joins us in our liturgical algebra, that he is honored or that liturgy is “kept safe” by keeping undesirables away. Perhaps the real scandal is in politicizing the blessings of God, determining the conditions by which and under which they can be offered. It isn’t scandalous to bless a married couple. It’s scandalous to throw them a cheap consolation prize in the name of God and send them on their way, into the non-liturgical world, while you congratulate yourself for protecting the liturgy from contamination.

As Schmemann pointed out, there are two different approaches to liturgical theology: we can treat the liturgy as an object for theology, or as the source of theology. Or as David W. Fagerberg puts it, we can look at liturgy or through it. Schmemann’s liturgical theology takes the second route. When we look through the liturgy as if we’re looking through a tiny crack in our living room wall, we see an entire world opening up. Liturgy is important because it trains our vision to look for the world beyond our tiny homes. But when it focuses its vision on itself, calls attention to only itself and its own boundaries, liturgy loses its vocation, which is to gather up all creation and remind it that it is blessed.

Liturgy’s role is less as an impermeable structure than as a springboard. The Christian liturgy should catapult us into the wider world so that we can bring it with us into the Kingdom. In other words, the liturgy should push us out of our place, and we should take the liturgy with us into new places that don’t yet understand themselves liturgically. Indeed, liturgy should make us question the very idea of such rigidly defined places.

Rather frustratingly, Fiducia supplicans is obsessed with keeping things in place:

When the prayer of blessing is requested by a couple in an irregular situation, even though it is expressed outside the rites prescribed by the liturgical books, this blessing should never be imparted in concurrence with the ceremonies of a civil union, and not even in connection with them. Nor can it be performed with any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding. The same applies when the blessing is requested by a same-sex couple.

 

Such a blessing may instead find its place in other contexts… [italics mine]

But God does not stay still. The Spirit blows where it will. Christ is unpredictable. The Kingdom of God springs up where you least expect it to. And God’s blessings are precisely for those who have been denied them.

Fiducia supplicans is desperate to preserve a distinction between the inside and outside of liturgy. But the distinction collapses under the glory of the word made flesh, of the God who goes outside of himself, who empties himself into the world only to gather it back up into himself and once again to bless it, eternally to bless it.

Last summer, I was in Halifax, Nova Scotia with my husband and one of our closest friends. The three of us were drinking our beverages of choice in front of a sushi restaurant when a Franciscan walked by. I told him I was a theologian and struck up a short conversation with him. As he went on his way, he said, “God bless you, guys.” My Catholic husband was nonplussed; our non-Catholic friend thought it was superstitious. But I cherished the blessing, and thanked God for the reminder of his loving accompaniment.

I don’t know what the Franciscan knew or thought he knew about us. I don’t know if he saw the ring on my finger and assumed I was married to one of the men at the table. I don’t know if he thought it was strange that I was allowed to teach theology at an Augustinian Catholic school. I only know that he offered us God’s blessing, spontaneously, reflexively, instinctually—without overthinking it, without complicating it, and without any sort of rubricism. But, at the same time, his blessing was liturgical insofar as he reminded us that the world is enchanted by God’s Spirit, and that at that precise moment, there was more going on than we noticed, that the Kingdom was slowly dawning, and that, if we would only open our eyes, we would see that we were actually drinking “to the glory of God” (I Corinthians 10:31).

Jesus blessed people the same way: both spontaneously and liturgically. He didn’t stop to get details about their lives. He knew enough to bless them. What he knew was that God was in love with them, that God was with them and for them, and that they had a place in his future—a future that is in fact without a temple, without any proper place for proper liturgy.

This is good news for me and my husband because, well, we usually find it difficult to kiss inside of a Church building.