The Coptic Orthodox Holy Synod announced on May 22 that it would resume theological dialogue with Rome after receiving “assurances regarding the non-blessing of same-sex couples” during the May 15 phone call between Tawadros II and Leo XIV. The Coptic statement says the resumption of dialogue followed those assurances.
Now compare that with the document still sitting on the Vatican website, still bearing the official authority of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, still unrevoked, still operative: Fiducia Supplicans. That declaration states, in its own words, that “the possibility of blessings for couples in irregular situations and for couples of the same sex” appears within its pastoral horizon. It then proceeds to describe those blessings as invocations of divine help upon persons whose “relationships” contain what is “true, good, and humanly valid.”
So which is it?
Are same-sex couples blessed or not blessed? Are they blessed only if Rome needs to reassure Germans, Belgians, Austrians, Jesuits, and New Ways Ministry donors, but not blessed if Rome needs to lure the Copts back to the ecumenical table? Does the blessing exist in Vienna but vanish in Alexandria? Does it become a “pastoral gesture” in the West and then dissolve into pure semantics when an ancient Oriental Church objects?
The official answer, of course, is fog. Rome will say it does not bless “unions,” only “couples.” It does not approve sin, only accompanies sinners. It does not ritualize, only spontaneously gestures. It does not change doctrine, only changes the pastoral application of the doctrine in such a way that everyone hostile to the old doctrine celebrates and everyone attached to it is told to stop being hysterical.
A neat trick, if you can get away with it.
But the Copts saw through it in 2024. Their Synod suspended theological dialogue after Fiducia Supplicans, rejecting blessings of homosexual relationships and treating the declaration as a grave obstacle to communion. Catholic Culture reported at the time that the Coptic Synod rejected “any blessing of homosexual relationships” and suspended dialogue less than three months after Fiducia Supplicans was issued.
And now Rome appears to have given them what traditional Catholics cannot get: reassurance.
The Copts do not have to accept homosexual blessings. The Orthodox do not have to accept the developed claims of Vatican I in their full second-millennium Roman form. Protestants may be met with endless “differentiated consensus.” Muslims may be greeted as brothers around a lantern at Christmas. Liberation theologians may be rehabilitated under the language of context. But the SSPX? Traditional Catholics? Those attached to the old Mass, old doctrine, old ecclesiology, old condemnations, old Roman clarity?
They get warnings about schism.
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