Assessing ‘Fiducia Supplicans’: The First 100 Days, by Edward Pentin

Christian Nationalists: In the Crosshairs, by Sheryl Collmer
March 28, 2024
Russian Church Sets Out Orthodox Rejection of Vatican Same-Sex Blessings, by Jonathan Luxmoore
March 28, 2024

Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the Vatican’s current doctrinal chief and principal drafter of ‘Fiducia Supplicans,’ is shown during the Synod on Synodality at the Vatican, Oct. 9, 2023. (photo: Edward Pentin / National Catholic Register)

By Edward Pentin, National Catholic Register, March 26, 2024

Editor’s note: This story has been updated from the original at 3:40 p.m. March 26

Edward Pentin Edward Pentin is the Register’s Senior Contributor and EWTN News Vatican Analyst. He began reporting on the Pope and the Vatican with Vatican Radio before moving on to become the Rome correspondent for EWTN’s National Catholic Register. …

 

ANALYSIS: Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, called the document in a March 17 interview a form of ‘cultural colonization.’

Edward PentinVATICAN CITY ­­— March 27 marks 100 days since the Vatican published Fiducia Supplicans, an instruction on blessings of persons in irregular unions. And while the controversy it stirred in the Church in the West has somewhat abated, opposition to the document and how it was implemented continues apace.

Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, who drafted a pan-African bishops’ statement in January rejecting “blessings for same sex couples in the African Churches,” has not relented in his criticisms, going so far as to say in a March 17 interview that the continent saw the document as a form of “cultural colonization.” …