Vatican Allows Same-Sex Blessings

 

An historic development in the Catholic Church - but it's only a small change in practice.  Reuters reports:

The Vatican said on Monday in a landmark ruling approved by Pope Francis that Roman Catholic priests can administer blessings to same-sex couples as long as they are not part of regular Church rituals or liturgies.

A document from the Vatican's doctrinal office, which effectively reversed a declaration the same body had issued in 2021, said such blessings would not legitimise irregular situations but be a sign that God welcomes all. . . .

The document, whose Latin title is Fiducia Supplicans (Supplicating Trust), said the form of the blessing "should not be fixed ritually by ecclesial authorities to avoid producing confusion with the blessing proper to the Sacrament of Marriage". . . .

The document said the blessing should not be linked to or timed with a civil marriage ceremony and be performed with none of the "clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding".

Places for such blessings, it said, might be "in other contexts, such as a visit to a shrine, a meeting with a priest, a prayer recited in a group, or during a pilgrimage".

The ruling was signed by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, the head of the head of the Vatican's Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and approved by the pope in a private audience with Fernandez and another doctrinal office official on Monday.

Full text of the declaration from the Vatican press office here.

In-depth analysis by Catholic media project The Pillar here, which notes:

The text was not issued in forma specifica, a particular formula in which a curial document is effectively co-signed by the pope, giving it full papal weight.

In other news, the Church of England yesterday began offering rites of blessing to same-sex couples.

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The Coronation in Focus: Crowns, Robes, and Thrones

More fascinating information about the coronation from English historian Dr. Allan Barton.

 

The Church of England has published the Order of Service as a PDF you can download here. 

Westminster Abbey has links to more details about the service and its setting here.

And many more links about all things royal at the Official Site of the royal family.

I do pray everything goes well and safely and happily on the day.

God Save the King.

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Two Churches, One Town

Today I discovered just by chance this mini-documentary of two beautiful 900-year-old churches in a lovely little English town - and the struggle to keep them from falling into ruin.  The high-definition videography is wonderful.  

You can learn more at the website Two Churches, One Town.

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Queers, Fears, and Crocodile Tears

Taking care to speak out of both sides of his mouth at once, His Grace the Most Reverend and Right Honourable The Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, Primate of All England and Metropolitan, has appeared on British television to say "how sorry I am for the hurt and pain, in the past and present, the Church has caused" to gays and lesbians. 

This after chairing a meeting last week of the Primates of the Anglican Communion that effectively suspended The Episcopal Church in the United States of America from the high councils of the Anglican Communion for the next three years.  Full text of the official communiqué is here. 

Why?  Because the Episcopal Church loves teh gayz so much they even marry them!  Horrors!  What terrible wickedness!  It's just the worst thing in the world!  Isn't it?

Meanwhile, the heads of the backwoods Anglican churches in Africa, South America, and other places are shouting hallelujah at this blow they have given - with Welby's help - to the "evil of homosexuality."  Some of those archbishops have outspokenly pushed for things like the infamous Kill-the-Gays bill in Uganda, and similar measures elsewhere.

All this is the latest chapter in the slow-motion breakup of the Anglican Communion - all on account of the filthy, nasty, perverted, unnatural gays, like you and me - a pity in one sense, but if the Archbishop of Canterbury wants to end up as merely the tool and titular head of a bunch of howling, foaming, murderous homophobes, that's his lookout.

The American church, of course, has been entirely independent of the Church of England since 1776, and will keep right on loving the gays, as newly installed Presiding Bishop Michael Curry says, more charitably than your Head Trucker is able to do:

Wikipedia map of the Anglican Communion,
comprising 38 provinces and 85 million members,
the third-largest Christian denomination in the world, after
the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.
Click to enlarge.  For legend, click here.

WTF? Church of England Drops Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage Bill

Yesterday, the Most Reverend Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin "Whatajerk" Welby, went out of his way to utterly trash the idea of same-sex marriage, saying it would "abolish" true marriage between men and women and replace it with "a less good option that is neither equal nor effective," thereby handing our homo-hating enemies a wonderful cache of ammo to use against us for years to come. Here's the video of his speech in the House of Lords:



Today, however, a church spokesman declared that after seeing large majorities in both Houses of Parliament vote in favor of the same-sex marriage bill, the Church has no further objections to make, and the 26 bishops who sit in the House of Lords will now work on amendments to refine and "improve" the bill. Which it seems is not so evil after all.

Politics. What a difference a day - or a vote - makes.  What a fucking turnaround.  What sheer, unmitigated hypocrisy.  I'm glad the Church, and presumably the two-faced Archbishop too, is going to stand out of the way now - but I am totally underwhelmed by their transparent, self-serving motives.

UK Parliament to Abolish Marriage

Watch a replay of the all-day debate in the House of Lords by clicking here.

So says the Most Reverend Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, in a speech during the House of Lords debate on a same-sex marriage bill today, as the Telegraph reports - emphasis mine:

In his first major intervention in the debate, the Most Rev Justin Welby said he could not support David Cameron’s same-sex marriage Bill in its current form.

He warned that the reform “weakened” the concept of the “normal” family as the basis for a strong community and replaced traditional marriage with something “less good”. . . .

Speaking on the first day of debate on the Bill in the House of Lords, the Archbishop warned that legalising same sex marriages would be a social problem, not a faith issue.

“We think that traditional marriage is a cornerstone of society,” he told peers.

“Rather than adding a new and valued institution alongside it for same gender relationships, which I would personally strongly support to strengthen us all, this Bill weakens what exists and replaces it with a less good option that is neither equal nor effective," he said.

“The concept of marriage as a normative place for procreation is lost; the idea as marriage as covenant is diminished; the family in its normal sense, predating the state, and as our base community of society, as we have already heard, is weakened.

“It is not at heart a faith issue,” he said. “It is about the general social good. So with much regret but entire conviction I cannot support the Bill as it stands.”

The Archbishop criticised the Bill for mistakenly treating marriages and weddings as the same thing. Gay couples can have equality without needing to be able to marry, he said. “Two things may be equal but different."

The Bill also fails to deliver equal rights for homosexuals because it distinguishes clearly between same-sex and opposite-sex marriage, “thus not achieving true equality”.

“The result is confusion. Marriage is abolished, redefined, and recreated, being different and unequal for different categories.”

The new definition of marriage is “an awkward shape” with same-sex and opposite sex marriages “scrunched into it” but not fitting well, the Archbishop said.

The Lords debate follows an overwhelming vote [366-161] in favour of the Marriage (same sex couples) Bill in the Commons last month.

Full text here, thanks to Grandmere Mimi who tracked it down and shared it with me.

I will post more on the debate, with some fine contributions from noble lords in support of the bill, when news video is available.

Meanwhile, your Head Trucker would like to direct your attention to the selfish, sex-crazed breeders notorious people, politely called heterosexuals, who are actually destroying the institution and have no respect at all for traditional family values:

The boarding school headmistress, her husband and the teenage pupil

Man who set up camera to catch a ghost instead catches girlfriend's affair with his 16-year-old son

Almost no couples with children who stay unmarried stay together, study claims

What She's Really Like

The Queen is highly amused at the Braemar Games.

Your Head Trucker asks his truckbuddies for their indulgence this long weekend as he provides some Jubilee coverage of things he finds interesting and enlightening about a lady all the world recognizes but very few really know. The Queen is one of the very few public figures left in this world that your Head Trucker admires unreservedly; and that not without some study of her character, more than merely glancing at an occasional headline.

Tonight, the Prince of Wales will appear on a BBC program to share some home movies of his parents and family, of which this short clip gives us some charming examples:



Prince William and Prince Andrew also will have some things to share about their lives behind palace walls, in an ITV special tonight:



The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gives yet a different perspective on the lady who is also his boss as Head of the Church of England:



Question:   One of you music queens out there must know the answer - what is that lovely chorale that begins about the 1:50 mark?

A Mother's Letter

William and Kate were married a year ago today in Westminster Abbey,
a moving and lovely event.  But when will it be our turn?

From the Church Times, a publication of the Church of England, comes this excerpt from a plaintive letter that shows how minds are changing:

As a committed, Bible-believing Chris­tian, I am ashamed and ap­palled by the debate about gay marriage. My views are not those of my son, who is gay and who is now an atheist, but result from some ten years of reading, prayer, dis­cussion, and serious thought.

My son came out at the age of 20, having spent much of his previous ten years knowing that he was not growing up to feel attracted to girls, but to boys. I don’t think he even knew the word “gay” at the be­ginning of this process, but he knew that he was growing up differently.

I am now convinced that homo­sexuality is a developmental condition that is not amenable to change at any psychological level; it is not a matter of choice; and is something that has caused many boys and girls to live in shame and fear from their early teens onwards. I know that my son had no access to other gay people through his adolescence, and that it was only at university that he was able to talk this through with hetero­sexual friends, finally coming to the conclusion that he was gay.

We, the Church, over centuries have perpetrated a great wickedness on these children and developing adults, forcing many to live by deceit, in failed heterosexual marriages, and even in an inability to form rela­tionships because of their own private hell.

At least the gay-rights cam­paigners have had the courage to stand up and work on some sort of social change. It is a pity that the Church did not do this in the first place. . . .

Yes, quite so.


Honk to Wounded Bird.

St. Laika's Church Welcomes You

Say fellas, want to tell you about something that I like a lot, and that is the online Holy Communion podcasts done by a fellow blogger called MadPriest - aka the Reverend Jonathan Haggar, who lives in Yorkshire, England, and is a (currently unemployed) priest in the Church of England.

For my truckbuddies who are believers but who, like me, cannot get to church for one reason or another, Jonathan's podcasts are the next best thing - they follow the Book of Common Prayer, but with Jonathan's delightfully quirky musical choices:  everything from cathedral choirs to rock and roll, black gospel and white gospel, old familiar hymns and newly written pieces.  Yet despite the eclectic mix of service music, it's all reverent and fitting, and surprisingly relevant to each week's readings, though you'd never hear the same stuff in church.

I think Jonathan's onto something good here.  Go check it out, if you need some spiritual nourishment, I think you'll like it.  I've posted the link in my Help & Support section in the sidebar, but here it is again:  The St. Laika Podcasts.

Everyone is welcome at St. Laika's, believers or not; you don't have to give your name or sign up for anything, and there are no membership requirements, only your interest in what's posted there. And if you do enjoy the service, which is available in three different audio formats, do consider leaving something in the virtual collection plate - although Jonathan says, "nothing at all is okay with me. I'd rather you listened than didn't listen because you are unable or unwilling to donate anything."

Warning labels are so gay

Queer playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare's, said it best four hundred years ago: "All them that love not Tobacco and Boys be fooles."

But alas, some in the Church of England are still way, way, way behind the times, and dangerously so, as the Daily Telegraph reports:

The Rev Dr Peter Mullen, who is rector of St Michael’s Cornhill and St Sepulchre without Newgate in the City, said in an internet blog that homosexuality was "clearly unnatural, a perversion and corruption of natural instincts and affections, and because it is a cause of fatal disease".

He wrote: "Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan SODOMY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH and their chins with FELLATIO KILLS".

The Bishop of London, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres, said the posting, which has since been taken down, was "highly offensive". The Rev Mullen, 66, was told on Friday that he could face disciplinary action.

Peter Tatchell of gay rights group OutRage! said he should resign.

The rector, who has written for The Daily Telegraph, insisted that he meant no harm: "I wrote some satirical things on my blog and anybody with an ounce of sense of humour or any understanding of the tradition of English satire would immediately assume that they’re light-hearted jokes."

Yeah right, you hateful old creep. Go bugger yourself, as our Brit friends would say.

Me, I'm with Marlowe all the way. Cigarettes and sodomy, amen to all that!