Vatican approves blessings for Same Sex Couples.

[fhtagn]

Pope Francis himself even clarified that the intent was to allow blessings for individual people in a same sex relationship, not same sex unions.

He also decided to allow Catholic priests to bless members of same-sex couples. Still, he has not allowed blessings of the union itself. 

"The blessing is for everyone, for everyone," he said. "To bless a homosexual-type union, however, goes against the given right, against the law of the Church. But to bless each person, why not? The blessing is for all. Some people were scandalized by this. But why?"

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pope-francis-interview-same-sex-couples-surrogacy-conservative-bishops-60-minutes/

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Pope Francis himself even clarified that the intent was to allow blessings for individual people in a same sex relationship, not same sex unions.

He also decided to allow Catholic priests to bless members of same-sex couples. Still, he has not allowed blessings of the union itself.

"The blessing is for everyone, for everyone," he said. "To bless a homosexual-type union, however, goes against the given right, against the law of the Church. But to bless each person, why not? The blessing is for all. Some people were scandalized by this. But why?"

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pope-francis-interview-same-sex-couples-surrogacy-conservative-bishops-60-minutes/

Yes yes yes, this has been uncontroversially the intended import for months. The point that the text of FS makes is that a "couple" is not the same thing as a "union" in this sense, and since the interview was conducted through an interpreter there's really no way of knowing whether Francis and the interviewer were on the same page about what the difference is. I'm constantly surprised how genuinely confused by this some people seem to be, but at this point there are ample resources available that explain it.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

In other respects, though, it's actually had positive externalities, like scuttling the good relationship that Francis was implausibly trying to maintain with the pseudo-Orthodoxy that's currently en vogue in Russia.

     The interesting wrinkle there is that Met. Hilarion of Budapest (formerly of Volokolamsk, a titular see belonging to the head of the Department on External Church Relations), is one of the biggest opponents of the Ukraine War in the Church in Russia and was demoted principally for questioning the regime narrative. He also is, as your CruxNow article indicates, pretty liberal on ecumenical relations and has been open to some rather bespoke concepts in that realm, e.g. reconciling with OOs while not requiring them to agree to Chalcedon. He's about as close as you can get to a genuine liberal bishop in that part of the world and if even he thinks that Fiducia Supplicans is a dealbreaker, it portends ill for developing positive relations with any of the local churches in the East.

I see. That's actually quite saddening.