Fiducia supplicans (FS) has been called lots of things.  Among the softer words are “confused,” “ambiguous,” “a mess,” and “self-contradictory.”  Stronger language would include “deceptive” and “incompetent.”

But what about, whatever its merits, “inopportune” or “wrongly timed”?  These might look like the weakest complaints, but maybe they are the strongest.

I mean, on what basis was this “Declaration” issued just one week before Christmas, when Catholics are supposed to be awaiting the Christ Child with all of their hearts?  “Days before Christmas. . .the whole of the Church’s leadership – and much of its clerical class – seemed to have been drawn into controversy,” J.D. Flynn noted in The Pillar.  Many bishops were dismayed, such as Cardinal Daniel Sturla, of Montevideo: “I don’t think it was a topic to be raised now, at Christmas. It caught my attention powerfully, because it is a controversial issue.  It is dividing waters within the Church.”

Major churchmen such as Archbishop Emeritus Chaput and CDF Prefect Emeritus Müller weighed in. Catholic commentators inevitably became focused on it, surely against their wishes.  Pillar, Catholic World Report, Crisis, First Things – writers at The Catholic Thing have discussed it seven times already during the “Christmas season” (taken broadly).

I heard Catholic parents complain about the perceived assault on their family Christmas preparations, along the lines, “Do I need to shield my children from Vatican teaching now?” “What happened to ‘make straight his paths’ in Advent?” “Wasn’t John the Baptist martyred for not blessing an ‘irregular relationship’?”   While we were embroiled in controversy, surely the Christ Child was neglected.

If you have been a Catholic for a while and sense that “it wasn’t always this way,” you would be right. I searched the Vatican website going back to 1960 for papal teachings intended for the whole Church, published in the last two weeks of Advent.  I found: nothing.  During those weeks, popes have given Angelus addresses and General Audiences.  They’ve met newly appointed Ambassadors and received delegations and persons.  But they have not issued any teaching or documents intended for the Church as a whole, understandably, so as not to draw attention away from the coming of The Lord.

The sole exception I discovered, sort of, was the “Letter of Pope John Paul II to Children in the Year of the Family” in 1994. But the letter is Christmas-centric.  It begins:

In a few days we shall celebrate Christmas, the holy day which is so full of meaning for all children in every family. . . .Christmas is the feast day of a Child, of a Newborn Baby. So it is your feast day too! You wait impatiently for it and get ready for it with joy, counting the days and even the hours to the Holy Night of Bethlehem.

I can almost see you: you are setting up the Crib at home, in the parish, in every corner of the world, recreating the surroundings and the atmosphere in which the Savior was born. Yes, it is true! At Christmastime, the stable and the manger take center place in the Church.

Pope John Paul II then says that “the main message of Christmas” is divine filiation, that, in baptism, we receive the power to become children of God. (John 1:12)

Eighteen years to the day before Fiducia supplicans, Pope Benedict at his Angelus address began, “In these last days of Advent the liturgy invites us to contemplate in a special way the Virgin Mary and St Joseph, who lived with unique intensity the period of expectation and preparation for Jesus’ birth.”

Citing Redemptoris custos, he recommends that the Church become “filled” with the silence of St. Joseph: “In a world that is often too noisy, that encourages neither recollection nor listening to God’s voice, we are in such deep need of it. During this season of preparation for Christmas, let us cultivate inner recollection in order to welcome and cherish Jesus in our own lives.”

So, a document which seems to invent a new category of blessing, precisely so that same-sex couples (and by-the-by persons in “irregular” relationships) could be blessed, just had to be released one week before Christmas.  Why?

I can think of only one putatively good reason, but that is explosive.  A bad reason would be that the DDF Prefect Fernández was tasked with writing this document with highest urgency, he fell behind schedule, and it was released weeks later than originally intended.  Another bad reason would be so that the document might receive precisely the attention that Cardinal Sturla said that it grabbed.

A good reason – the only good reason – would be that the document was conceived of as a Christmas message.  It does not say so openly, but it seems to signal this idea in its opening lines: “The great blessing of God is Jesus Christ. . . .He is the Eternal Word, with whom the Father blessed us ‘while we were still sinners’ (Romans 5:8), as St. Paul says. He is the Word made flesh.”  (See Pope Francis’s 2020 General Audience instruction on The Blessing).

Indeed, as The Pillar reported, the group LGBT+ Catholics Westminster referred to FS as a “welcoming, Christmas gift” from the DDF and Pope Francis.  While Bishop Cullinan in Ireland opined, “This document is a valuable gift since it focuses on the beauty of blessings flowing from the heart of God and is particularly welcome before Christmas when we celebrate the greatest blessing on our world – Christ Our Saviour – who is born among us.”

So, was FS a blight upon Christmas and at odds with “the main message of Christmas,” or did it express, apparently for the first time, the true meaning of Christmas?

The question thus posed is explosive. There are two fundamental mysteries of the Christian faith: the Incarnation and the Trinity.  Christians can dispute about all kinds of things, and they have done so for centuries.  But once a dispute gets tied to the nature of the Incarnation, then it is no ordinary disagreement – as a division over the Incarnation, it seems, can be resolved only by a Council.