February 3 is the feast of St. Blase.  Among that feast’s best-known customs is the blessing of throats.  St. Blase is the patron of those with throat afflictions because he was said to have saved a young boy who was dying of a fishbone stuck in his throat.

Many Catholics remember going up to a priest, who placed two crossed candles around the neck, praying: “Through the intercession of Saint Blase, bishop and martyr, may God deliver you from every disease of the throat and from every other illness. In the name of the Father, + and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

I mention this custom partly in light of the controversy spurred by Fiducia supplicans, the recent Vatican document that purports to “develop” the theology of blessings.  Comparison to the St. Blase blessings is illuminating.

Defenders of Fiducia supplicans reject criticism because they insist that, when people ordinarily approach a priest for a “blessing,” the Church does not ask about the moral state of their consciences, so there should be no reason to question two homosexuals who do the same.  That was the Pope’s line in his January 26 address to the DDF.

Well, I never remember any priest asking me neither about my moral state nor even my potential pharyngeal pathologies as I stood in line on St. Blase’s Day.  But the context made clear to all concerned what was going on: those presenting themselves were seeking to have their throats blessed against whatever evils might befall them that way.

As a kid of an overprotective Polish mother who swaddled me whenever I went outside – against a dreaded cold – it was a special blessing. A man in my parish had a tracheotomy. There were doubtless others who suffered from throat cancer.  COVID reminded us that not being able to breathe is deadly.  And when I, age 43, had a bone from an unfilleted salmon caught in my throat, I understood why St. Blase was important.

People were not in that line for some ambiguous, generic blessing.

Likewise, I have entered the confessional not seeking absolution but advice and, before I left,  have asked the priest for a blessing.  Sometimes that request was for a blessing to do what I felt incapable of at that moment but that, too, was clear to the priest. I recognized the gap between where I was and where I should be. And sought God’s blessing to close the chasm.  Again, however, the confessional context made clear that something was awry.

That is not what Fiducia supplicans does.

All its equivocations and reservations aside, Fiducia supplicans creates an ambiguous situation, which its author prefers leaving ambiguous.  Not blessing the supplicants as a “couple” is a bone to those who say this is a blessing of a same-sex “union” in all but name.  Not engaging in “moral” queries is a Jesuitical  strawman because, ordinarily, a priest would not ask those questions anyway except in an ambiguous situation.

It’s “equivocal” because Fiducia does not want the priest to make efforts towards dispelling that ambiguity, lest he get a problematic answer.

It’s Jesuitical, because the ambiguity allows the one blessing and the one blessed to interpret an invocation that “they may live the Gospel of Christ in full fidelity,” each according to his own lights.

As I recently wrote here, Fiducia embodies a new ecclesiastical math, where 1 + 1 ≠2.  In fact, it’s a new Church algebra, where 1+1 = 1x, but please don’t resolve the unknown.

This schizophrenic approach to what the Church teaches and its relationship to her salvific mission seems ultimately grounded in Francis’s notion of “pastoral” care.  But it is a bizarre notion of theology that would have the Church teaching one thing with certainty on the theoretical and normative level, but then fudging its application on the pastoral and personal level – a chasm Francis’s “paradigm” cleaves rather than heals.

Francis seems to believe that, on the individual level, one can never have moral certainty and, practically, objective certainty really does not matter.

Indeed, one might even ask if Francis does not believe in some form of magic.  Traditional sacramental theologians were accused of “magic” because of their ex opere operato approach to sacramental efficacy: say the proper words and – hocus pocus! – you have a sacrament!

Francis’ approach seems to be a reverse magic: no matter what the Church teaches  (ostensibly teaching what God prescribes) and absent even a purpose of amendment or even repentance, just hand out the “sacraments!”  Absolve away, lest Francis brand you a deliquenti foe for exercising your Christ-given mandate “to bind and loose.”

Distribute Communion publicly to those whose life situations are objectively scandalous.  And wrap it all up in a caricature of “mercy.”  Don’t worry if it is inconsistent with Catholic theology as understood before the conclave of 2013: God does what He wants and who are we to “discern” otherwise?

Of course, in practice this produces the institutional Church versus some divine, blessings-and-maybe-grace-dispensing “religion.” Can we even call it a “Church” given that Francis claims that religious multiplicity is God’s Will, something clearly in conflict with the faith and morals of the “institutional Church?”

Only against such a paradigm does Fiducia’s new-found “theology of blessing” truly make sense.  Traditionally, all blessings are liturgically connected, because all blessings are intended to lead us to God in the great liturgy of Heaven.

That is why the “Directory on Popular Piety and Worship” advises priests, when conferring blessings, to give them a “typical structure,” i.e., a proclamation of the Word of God that explains them and an imprecation for divine assistance. (no. 272)  Fiducia simply ignores that, declares a new species of self-standing “blessing” separate from the liturgy (and, therefore, the liturgical Church but maybe not the Divine religion) and counsels priests – via press release – to devise ex tempore blessings that are “short and simple.”

Is the result not a new “theology of blessing” but, arguably, a new ecclesiology, if not theology of religion?