EWTN News portal reports that Cardinal Reinhard Marx, “archbishop” of Munich and Freising, has issued binding instructions to priests and pastoral staff in his “archdiocese” to implement the heretical handout „Blessing Gives Strength to Love” as the official basis for pastoral care of homosexual couples and divorced-and-remarried adulterers. Priests who refuse to participate in these blasphemous ceremonies are merely instructed to redirect the couples to a dean or other compliant staff member — thereby ensuring that no sodomite or adulterer is denied access to this pseudo-sacramental abomination. The handout, which emerged from the synodal Unweg (German for “path,” though more aptly “dead end”), was adopted in March 2023 with 92% of the votes at the fifth synodal meeting and formally presented in spring 2025. Marx emphasized that “the blessing is not the celebration of a sacramental marriage” — a distinction without a difference, since the act itself constitutes public ecclesiastical approval of gravely sinful unions. The Archdiocese of Cologne and several Bavarian dioceses have rejected the handout, citing Fiducia Supplicans as justification — itself a heretical document issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith under the antipope’s authority.
The Theological Bankruptcy of “Blessing” Sin
The entire edifice of this pastoral directive rests upon a fundamental inversion of Catholic moral theology: the claim that the Church can or should “bless” what God condemns. The Catechism of the Catholic Council of Trent — and indeed every authoritative magisterial document prior to the conciliar apostasy — teaches with absolute clarity that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to natural law.” They “close the sexual act to the gift of life” and “do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity.” The conciliar Catechism (itself a product of the post-1958 revolution) preserves this language in paragraph 2357, though the living magisterium of the conciliar sect now systematically contradicts it in practice.
Cardinal Marx’s instruction that the “theological meaning” of the handout be explained to those who “still struggle with this blessing” reveals the true nature of the enterprise: this is not pastoral accommodation but ideological formation — the systematic re-education of clergy and faithful to accept what the Church has condemned for two millennia. The language of “struggle” frames orthodox resistance not as fidelity to divine law but as a psychological defect to be overcome through bureaucratic pressure and institutional coercion.
The claim that “the blessing is not the celebration of a sacramental marriage” is a distinction engineered to obscure the essential point: the Church possesses no authority to bless sin. As Pope Pius IX declared in the Syllabus of Errors, the Church’s authority extends to the governance of souls according to divine law — not to the ratification of unnatural vice. The very concept of a “blessing” for a union that constitutes, in the objective order, a mortal sin against chastity and natural law, is a contradictio in terminis — a contradiction in terms. A blessing by its nature invokes divine favor; divine favor cannot be invoked upon that which God has expressly cursed.
The Synodal Way: Democracy Against the Holy Ghost
The provenance of this handout is itself damning. It emerged from the Synodal Way (Synodaler Weg), the German conciliar structure that functions as a permanent revolutionary assembly, systematically dismantling Catholic doctrine through majority vote. The fact that 92% of synodal delegates approved the text is presented as legitimizing — but the truth of Catholic doctrine is not determined by democratic process. As the Council of Trent affirmed, the deposit of faith was delivered through Sacred Scripture and Tradition, guarded by the Magisterium under the charism of infallibility. The Holy Ghost does not vote; He teaches through the authoritative organs of the true Church.
The Synodal Way represents the culmination of the democratization of the Church — one of the most pernicious errors condemned by Pope St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), where he identified the modernist principle that “the Church listening cooperates in such a way with the Church teaching in defining truths of faith, that the Church teaching should only approve the common opinions of the Church listening” (Proposition 6 of Lamentabili). The Synodal Way operationalizes this heresy: doctrine is determined not by divine revelation authentically interpreted by the Magisterium, but by the shifting consensus of a politicized assembly.
Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned the proposition that “the Church is not a true and perfect society, entirely free — nor is she endowed with proper and perpetual rights of her own, conferred upon her by her Divine Founder” (Proposition 19). The Synodal Way treats the Church as a voluntary association whose doctrines and practices are subject to revision by its members — precisely the error the Syllabus anathematized.
Fiducia Supplicans: Heresy by Declaration
The document Fiducia Supplicans, issued in December 2023 by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith under the antipope’s authority, is cited by some German dioceses as the basis for permitting these blessings. This document represents a formal departure from two millennia of Catholic teaching on the nature of blessings, the moral law, and the Church’s pastoral mission.
The document’s attempt to distinguish between blessing the persons and blessing the union is sophistry of the most transparent order. Paragraph 31 states that blessings may not be “ritually determined by the ecclesiastical authorities … so as not to cause confusion with the blessing of the sacrament of marriage.” Paragraph 38 adds that one should “neither promote the blessing of couples who are in an irregular situation nor provide a ritual for it.” Paragraph 39 expressly excludes blessings “in direct connection with a civil celebration” and forbids “the clothes, the gestures, and the words that are the expression for a marriage.”
Yet the German handout systematically violates every one of these restrictions. It provides a ritual. It promotes the blessings. It employs gestures and words that simulate matrimonial blessings. Cardinal Marx’s instruction to implement it as “the basis of pastoral care” constitutes a direct and deliberate violation of the very document cited as its justification. This is not fidelity to Fiducia Supplicans — it is exploitation of its ambiguity to advance the agenda that the document itself was designed to advance by more insidious means.
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — formerly the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, successor to the Holy Office — has itself become an instrument of doctrinal dissolution. This is the same institution that, under the 1917 Code of Canon Law, was charged with guarding the integrity of faith and morals. Its transformation into a vehicle for the propagation of moral error is one of the most striking confirmations of the sedevacantist thesis: the structures occupying the Vatican have become instruments of apostasy.
The Primacy of Divine Law Over Human Innovation
The Catholic Church has always taught that divine law is immutable and that no human authority — whether secular or ecclesiastical — has the power to alter it. As Pope Pius IX declared in the Syllabus of Errors, “Moral laws do not stand in need of the divine sanction, and it is not at all necessary that human laws should be made conformable to the laws of nature and receive their power of binding from God” is a condemned error (Proposition 56). The natural law regarding sexual morality — that the sexual act is ordered exclusively toward the union of husband and wife open to the transmission of life — is not a disciplinary regulation subject to revision but a permanent truth inscribed in the very structure of human nature by the Creator.
Cardinal Marx and the German “bishops” who support this initiative place themselves in the condemned category of those who teach that “the science of philosophical things and morals and also civil laws may and ought to keep aloof from divine and ecclesiastical authority” (Proposition 57 of the Syllabus). By constructing a “theological meaning” for the blessing of sodomite unions, they arrogate to themselves an authority that belongs to God alone: the authority to redefine the moral order.
Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Immortale Dei (1885), taught that “the Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, each supreme in its own kind, and each fixed within limits which are defined by its own nature and special object.” The Church’s authority is delegated, not autonomous — it extends only to the faithful application of divine law, never to its abrogation. When “cardinals” and “bishops” claim the authority to bless what God has condemned, they exceed the limits of their commission and act sine auctoritate — without authority.
The Marginalization of the Faithful
Cardinal Marx’s instruction that priests who refuse to perform these blessings must merely refer couples to a dean or other staff member reveals the totalitarian logic underlying this initiative: dissent will be tolerated only insofar as it does not impede the implementation of the program. The faithful priest who declines to participate in the blessing of sin is not permitted to exercise his conscience; he is required to facilitate the sin’s “blessing” by redirecting the request to a willing accomplice.
This is the logic of the Gleichschaltung — the forced coordination of all institutional actors toward a single ideological goal. It mirrors the bureaucratic mechanisms of every totalitarian system: individual conscience is subordinated to institutional compliance, and the institution itself is subordinated to an ideological program that claims legitimacy through procedural mechanisms (synodal votes, dicastery declarations) rather than through conformity to divine truth.
The Archdiocese of Cologne and the dioceses of Augsburg, Eichstätt, Passau, and Regensburg are reported to have rejected the handout, citing Fiducia Supplicans as justification. This resistance, while welcome in its limited scope, is itself compromised by its acknowledgment of the authority of the conciliar structures and their documents. The true ground for rejection is not Fiducia Supplicans but the immutable natural law and the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church — truths that no conciliar declaration can alter and to which no “pope” or “dicastery” can dispense.
The Fruit of the Conciliar Revolution
This development in Germany is not an aberration but the logical and inevitable fruit of the conciliar revolution that began with John XXIII’s convocation of Vatican II in 1958. The entire trajectory of post-conciliarism — from the introduction of the Novus Ordo Missae to the embrace of religious liberty, from ecumenism to interreligious dialogue, from the “reform” of the liturgy to the dissolution of moral discipline — has been a systematic dismantling of the Catholic Church’s doctrinal, liturgical, and moral edifice.
St. Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, identified modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies” — precisely because it does not attack one doctrine in particular but undermines the very foundations of the faith: the possibility of certain knowledge of divine truth, the immutability of dogma, the authority of the Magisterium, and the objective reality of the moral law. The blessing of same-sex unions is modernism made manifest in pastoral practice: the denial that divine law imposes objective constraints on human behavior, and the assertion that the Church’s pastoral practice must evolve to accommodate the “signs of the times” rather than the unchanging truth of revelation.
Pius IX condemned the proposition that “in the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship” (Proposition 77 of the Syllabus). The corollary applies with equal force to moral truth: it is not expedient that the Church should uphold the objective immorality of homosexual acts, because modern civilization has declared such acts acceptable. The conciliar sect has accepted this corollary; it has subordinated divine truth to the dictates of contemporary culture.
Conclusion: The Abomination Institutionalized
Cardinal Marx’s instruction to implement the blessing of same-sex couples as “the basis of pastoral care” represents a new stage in the institutionalization of apostasy within the conciliar structures. It is not a marginal initiative or a local eccentricity; it is the systematic application of principles that have been developing within the conciliar sect for nearly seven decades — principles rooted in modernism, advanced through the Synodal Way, and given pseudo-authoritative cover by documents such as Fiducia Supplicans.
The faithful Catholic recognizes in this development not a “development of doctrine” but a manifestation of the abomination of desolation spoken of by Our Lord (Matthew 24:15). The structures occupying the Vatican have progressively emptied themselves of Catholic content while retaining the external forms of Catholic institution. What remains is a simulacrum — a counterfeit church that uses the language of Catholicism to advance the agenda of the world.
As Pope Pius XI declared in Quas Primas, the reign of Christ the King extends over all persons, families, and states — and the Church, as a perfect society, demands full freedom and independence from secular authority in fulfilling her divine mission. The German “bishops” who implement this program have rejected that reign. They have placed themselves under the authority of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Their “blessings” are not blessings but maledictions — invocations of divine judgment upon those who presume to bless what God has cursed.
The true Church endures — in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith, in the priests who offer the Most Holy Sacrifice according to the immemorial rite, in the bishops who guard the deposit of faith against all innovation. Against the abomination institutionalized by Cardinal Marx and his accomplices, the faithful must stand firm in the truth that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39).
Source:
German cardinal instructs priests to facilitate same-sex couple blessings (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 22.04.2026