A German cardinal has admitted to blessing couples in same-sex relationships and has called for a change in Catholic teaching on homosexuality.

Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising is the latest of a string of senior European clerics to call upon the Catholic Church to ditch its traditional teaching that homosexual sexual acts are objectively disordered.

In an interview with Stern, a German magazine, the 68-year-old cardinal declared that the Catechism of the Catholic Church was “not set in stone” and the faithful therefore had a right to question what it taught.

He said: “Homosexuality is not a sin. It corresponds to a Christian attitude when two people, regardless of gender, stand up for each other, in joy and sorrow.”

He added: “A few years ago in Los Angeles, after a service, two (couples in same-sex relationships) came to ask for my blessing. So I did. It wasn’t a wedding ceremony. We can’t offer the sacrament of marriage.”

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) ruled last summer that the Church did not have the power to offer blessings to same-sex unions, causing an outcry from progressives.

Archbishop Giacomo Morandi, the official who is said to have been the driving force behind the statement, was later removed from his post as secretary of the CDF and effectively demoted to diocesan Bishop of Reggio Emilia-Guastalla, Italy.

Last month Cardinal Marx celebrated a Mass in Munich to mark the 20th anniversary of “queer services” in the Church.

During the Mass, he apologised for discrimination by Catholics against people with deep-rooted same-sex attraction and said he sought an “inclusive Church”.

A decade ago it would not have been possible to have celebrated such a Mass, the cardinal told Stern.

“For years I have felt freer to say what I think, and I want to take church teaching forward,” he told the magazine.

“An inclusive ethic that we envision is not about being lax — as some claim,” Cardinal Marx said in the interview.

“It is about something else: encounter at eye level, respect for the other. The value of love is shown in the relationship; in not making the other person an object, in not using or humiliating the other person, in being faithful and dependable to each other. The Catechism is not set in stone. One may also doubt what it says,” he said.

He continued: “We discussed these questions during the family synod, but there was reluctance to set something down.

“Even then I said: there are people living in an intimate love relationship that is expressed sexually. Are we really going to say that this is worthless?

“Sure, there are people who want to see sexuality limited to procreation, but what do they say to people who can’t have children?”

The comments of Cardinal Marx follow those of Bishop Georg Bätzing, chairman of the German bishops’ conference, who also called for the Catechism to be change to accommodate contemporary attitudes to sexuality.

“Sexuality is a gift from God, and not a sin,” he said after participants in the German Synodal Way voted in favour of same-sex blessings and endorsed demands to revise the teachings of the Catechism on homosexuality.

A few weeks earlier, Jesuit Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, whom Pope Francis has appointed Relator General of the concluding meeting of the Synod of Bishops in October 2023, announced that Catholic teaching on the morality of homosexual sexual acts is “false” and could be changed.

“I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is no longer correct, what one formerly condemned was sodomy,” said Cardinal Hollerich, president of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the EU.

“One thought at that time that in the sperm of the man, the whole child was kept. And one has simply transferred this to homosexual men. But there is no homosexuality at all in the New Testament. There is only discussion of homosexual acts, which were to some extent pagan cultic acts. That was naturally forbidden. I believe it is time for us to make a revision in the basic foundation of the teaching.”

The comments of Bishop Bätzing and Cardinal Hollerich prompted Australian Cardinal George Pell to ask the CDF to publicly reprimand them for their “wholesale and explicit rejection” of the Church’s teaching on sexual ethics.

Cardinal Pell said that to follow “the changing dictates of contemporary secular culture” would spell the self-destruction of the Church and asked the CDF to “intervene and pronounce judgement” on the comments of the two clerics.

The cardinal said their teaching was “erroneous” because it “not only rejects the ancient Judeo-Christian doctrines against homosexual activity, but undermines and rejects the teaching on monogamous marriage, the exclusive union of a man and a woman”.

He said that “not one of the Ten Commandments is optional” and that the Catholic Church could not have “a special Australian or German version of the Ten Commandments”.

“Nor can we follow Bertrand Russell, the English atheist philosopher, who suggested the Ten Commandments might be like an exam — where only six out of 10 questions need to be answered,” he said.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that all Christians are called to chastity, which means that sexual activity is restricted to the life-long and exclusive union between a husband and a wife.

It acknowledges the universal prevalence of same-sex attraction and notes that “its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained”.

But it says that Sacred Scripture, from the Book of Genesis to the Letters of St Paul, has presented homosexual acts as depraved, and says Tradition – the other pillar of Catholic teaching – has always considered homosexual acts to be “disordered”.

The Catechism adds, however, that people with strong same-sex attractions “must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity”.

“Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard must be avoided,” it says.

“Homosexual persons are called to chastity,” it adds. “By the virtues of self-mastery that teaches them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.”

(Photo: erzbistummuenchen/Facebook via CNA)

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