{‘P} repare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.” The season of Advent, which concludes today, began with a call to conversion. This is a different point of emphasis from the controversy around the Catholic Church’s ostensible blessing of same-sex unions, which exploded the week before Christmas.

By now, Catholics have come to expect — and the more prudent, to ignore — these episodes. The pope makes or approves an ambiguous statement about a controversial Catholic social teaching — in this case, a document on the “pastoral meaning of blessings” by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, addressing the question of blessings for same-sex unions — media outlets interpret it as a step toward a more progressive church, and Catholics of both progressive and orthodox persuasions scour the internet for evidence that their preferred interpretation is the correct one.

The document is not a contradiction of faith and morals. As Ed Condon at the Pillar notes, Fiducia Supplicans “contains numerous, explicit statements that it does not change church teaching on the sinfulness of non-marital sexual partnerships, as well as several specific prohibitions on the practice of blessing persons in such relationships, to avoid any confusion about what is being blessed.” Nevertheless, those who wish to undermine church teachings will find in its ambiguity and verbosity license to do so. The document reads that “the pastoral sensibility of ordained ministers should also be formed to perform blessings spontaneously,” presumably using whatever words come to mind.

You can read the document here. But be warned. As Dan Hitchens writes in First Things, it is “a black hole.” For instance, the document does not explain its apparent contradiction with a previous Vatican statement that the pope signed in 2021, which read:

It is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage, . . . as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex. The presence in such relationships of positive elements . . . cannot justify these relationships and render them legitimate objects of an ecclesial blessing.

In contrast, the 2023 document states that those in “irregular situations” (including cohabitating couples and those in religiously invalid civil marriages), as well as “couples of the same sex,” may receive a blessing in a spirit of humility, “recognizing themselves to be destitute and in need of [God’s] help,” and not as a “legitimation of their own status,” that “all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit.”

“Given that there are now two contradictory papal teachings — the 2021 document and the 2023 one — it is clearly logically impossible to deny that popes, when not speaking ex cathedra, can sometimes err,” Hitchens writes. Inevitably, the effect of such contradiction is confusion and scandal.

Blessings are called “sacramentals” and, as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops notes, “exist to prepare us to receive the grace of the sacraments and help us to grow more like Christ.” Yet nowhere in Fiducia Supplicans is this connection made.

Blessings are signposts to the sacraments, not substitutes for them. Those recognizing themselves to be “destitute and in need of God’s help” — who should be all Catholics — have at their availability the sacrament of penance. Solid Catholic formation emphasizes the need to make frequent examinations of conscience and to attend confession regularly. Moreover, Catholics who wish to enhance all that is “true” and “good” within them and to have their lives and relationships “enriched, healed, and elevated” can do so by approaching the sacrament of the Eucharist when properly disposed (i.e., after having confessed any mortal sins to a priest).

For years, there has been a practice among Mass-goers who are not receiving communion to “go up for a blessing.” Though this is preferable to receiving communion when not properly disposed to do so, it is superfluous because the entire congregation receives a blessing at the end of Mass anyway. Is the purpose to allow the person seeking a blessing to “save face” while others go up for communion?

If so, since when are Catholics in the business of saving face? At the beginning of every Mass, the entire congregation recites that they have sinned through their “most grievous fault” and need all the help they can get. Oscar Wilde famously said that the Catholic Church was “for saints and sinners alone — for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.”

Sin is a universal human struggle. Everyone is afflicted, and all are welcome in the church. But, as Cardinal Francis George put it, all are welcome “on Christ’s terms, not their own.” On top of everything else, then, Fiducia Supplicans is poorly timed. Advent is not a time for complacency but conversion, accepting God’s loving invitation to a life of grace.