A recent Vatican News article used a 2000 instruction by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to justify the blessing of irregular couples.
On Feb. 27, Vatican News published an articleheadlined: ‘Fiducia Supplicans,’ Non-liturgical Blessings and Pope Benedict’s Distinction.
The aim of the article was to assert that distinguishing between rituals inserted into liturgical books and pastoral or spontaneous prayers is the same criterion now being used to admit the possibility of blessing irregular couples.
The article juxtaposes the recent Declaration with some passages from the Vatican instruction Ardens Felicitatis, promulgated by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on Sept. 14, 2000.
That document concerned prayers and how they can obtain healing from God, and it arose from the need to bring order to the confusion of those years about prayer gatherings and the charism of healing.
However, the comparison that the Vatican News article makes between these two documents is completely wrong.
Firstly, it’s important to point out that prayer is an insistent request, as the word itself indicates, while a blessing is a formula of approval (bene dicere) from above, that is, from God.
In the 2000 Instruction, it explains that the goal of prayers for healing is to invoke deliverance from bodily and spiritual evil, and it stresses that no prayer can be made to God to confirm the state of sin into which one had fallen.
Ardens Felicitatis aimed to help regulate the growing novelty of prayer gatherings given that they are combined with liturgical celebrations aimed at imploring healing from God, underlining the liturgical aspect over which the Church must watch and give norms, so that such practices may be disciplined righteously.
After presenting the desire for healing and the prayer to obtain it, explaining how Jesus exercised the charism of healing, and outlining the charism of healing in the present context, the Instruction goes on to discuss disciplinary provisions.
“Prayers to obtain healing,” the Instruction stresses, “are called liturgical if they are found in approved liturgical books,” otherwise they are spontaneous prayers. Regarding these, they must remain distinct from liturgical prayers and must not be confused with them, as the Instruction makes clear.
They are not blessings, and they have no efficacy as blessings, especially if the faithful do not want to leave the state of sin. Even the reference to the Ordo benedictionis infirmorum, found in the Rituale Romanum, in point 2 of the Instruction, concerns “the euchological texts,” that is, the healing prayers contained therein, not the blessing formulas, which instead constitute the sacramentals proper.
Nowhere in the Instruction, in fact, is there any mention of blessings, beyond a single reference to “the blessings of good health.” The Vatican News article, then, incurs a glaring oversight by calling Ratzinger into question.
Read the rest: https://www.ncregister.com/blog/bux-non-liturgical-blessings
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