After a meeting with delegates from a local gay working group last week, Cardinal Jozef De Kesel said he was concerned for their well-being and spoke of his respect for them.

He also spoke of gay couples' relationships, noting these are not the same as Christian marriage between a man and a woman.

At the same time, he acknowledged the personal encounter gay couples have.

De Kesel wants to respond to gay couples' requests when they are believers, involved in stable, lasting relationships and wish their relationships to benefit from the church's symbolic recognition.

However, this recognition won't be the same a religious marriage. Nor will it be an ecclesiastical blessing that too closely resembles the blessing of a marriage.

Nor would it involve an exchange of consent sealed by an exchange of rings.

Instead, if gay people want a Christian symbol of their proximity, a celebration of thanksgiving or prayer is more likely, De Kessel's spokesman Geert De Kerpel says.

"To the extent that the church has maintained a certain reserve on the issue, it is to preserve the great value of marriage and the family to the greatest extent possible."

Although Belgian media have suggested De Kesel is adopting a "revolutionary position," his stance reflects the Belgian Church has already taken on gay couples' relationships.

Source

• La Croix
• LifeSiteNews
• Image: LifeSiteNews

Marx is the president of the German Catholic Bishops' Conference.

Marx says church leaders in the field of pastoral care work and pastoral care should consider the situation of the individual.

This means they must "try harder to accompany them in their circumstances of life".

Gay people are included in this, so priests and pastoral workers must be encouraged to accompany people according to their individual situuations.

There are no general solutions, he says.

Instead, priests should be allowed to bless gay couples on a case-by-case basis.

Marx says the decision should be made by "the pastor on the ground, and the individual under pastoral care".

"It's about pastoral care for individual cases, and that applies in other areas as well, which we can not regulate, where we have no sets of rules."

While he stopped short of fully endorsing blessings for same-sex couples, his positive comments made it clear he was open to approving such benedictions in private ceremonies.

"The issue is how the church can do justice to the challenges that new living conditions and new insights bring," Marx says.

Bishop Franz-Josef Bode, who is the vice-president of the German Catholic bishops' conference, also asked for deeper discussion on church blessings for homosexual partnerships.

He says it is unhelpful to remain silent about such taboo subjects concerning the "political reality" of same-sex marriage.

"We must therefore ask ourselves how we should encounter and respond to those who enter into such partnerships and remain committed to the Church," Bode says.

"We must ask ourselves how we should accompany them pastorally and liturgically and how we can meet their needs."

• Religion News Service
• Catholic Herald
• La Croix
• Image: Christian Today

In a lengthy interview on Lifesitenews, Cardinal Raymond Burke criticised what he called confusion in the Church.

Cardinal Burke was asked about other prelates who had pointed out good qualities in relationships the Church defines as irregular or immoral.

"If you are living publicly in a state of mortal sin there isn't any good act that you can perform that justifies that situation: the person remains in grave sin," Cardinal Burke said.

People living in what the Church calls gravely sinful situations are called to conversion, he added.

Asked if being "kind" and "generous" and "dedicated" is enough, Cardinal Burke replied: "Of course it's not. It's like the person who murders someone and yet is kind to other people."

In commentary on the Religion News Service, David Gibson noted that the Church has always taught that sin is sin and some sins are particularly serious.

But comparing cohabitation, homosexual relations and adultery with murder in any context is unusual, and certainly out of step with the pastoral tone that Francis has set in his papacy, Gibson wrote.

During last year's family synod, several prelates spoke about the lives of unmarried or remarried couples as having value that the Church should recognise.

Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn has repeatedly stressed that the Church should "look at the person and not the sexual orientation".

Similarly, Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, a senior adviser to Francis, once said that "one simply cannot say that a faithful homosexual relationship that has held for decades is nothing".

"We just mustn't lump things together and measure everything with the same yardstick, but must differentiate and take a closer look, which doesn't mean that I endorse homosexuality as a whole," he said.

Last year, Pope Francis did not reappoint Cardinal Burke as prefect of the Apostolic Signatura when his term expired.

Instead the cardinal was given a largely ceremonial role with the Order of Malta.

Sources

• Religion News Service
• Lifesitenews
• Lifesitenews
• Image: Time