What is a “couple”?

In my recent article on the controversy over Fiducia Supplicans, I noted three problems with the document’s qualified permission of blessings for “couples” of a same-sex or other “irregular” kind.  First, the document is not consistent with the Vatican’s 2021 statement on the subject, which prohibited such blessings, nor consistent even with itself.  Second, its incoherence makes abuses of its permission inevitable, despite the qualifications.  Third, the implicature carried by the act of issuing this permission “sends the message” that the Church in some way approves of such couples, even if this message was not intended.  In an interview with The Pillar, Cardinal Fernández addresses the controversy, but unfortunately, his remarks exacerbate rather than resolve the problems.

Cardinal Fernández’s answer

Some defenders of Fiducia Supplicans have suggested that the document intends “couple” to be understood merely as a pair of individuals, without reference to any special relationship between them.  I explained in my earlier article why that simply is not plausible, and the cardinal’s remarks in the interview now decisively rule this interpretation out.  Consider these passages from the interview:

Sometimes they are two very close friends who share good things, sometimes they had sexual relations in the past and now what remains is a strong sense of belonging and mutual help. As a parish priest, I have often met such couples…

[In] a simple blessing, it is still asked that this friendship be purified, matured and lived in fidelity to the Gospel.  And even if there was some kind of sexual relationship, known or not, the blessing made in this way does not validate or justify anything.

Actually the same thing happens whenever individuals are blessed, because that individual who asks for a blessing… may be a great sinner, but we do not deny a blessing to him…

When it is a matter of a couple well-known in the place or in cases where there could be some scandal, the blessing should be given in private, in a discreet place.

End quote.  So, the “couples” that Fiducia Supplicans has in view include “friendships” and “two very close friends,” who may have “had sexual relations in the past” or “some kind of sexual relationship” in the past, who retain “a strong sense of belonging and mutual help” and may be “well-known in [some] place” to be a couple.  And blessing such couples is explicitly contrasted with blessing “individuals.”  All of this makes it undeniable that what Fiducia Supplicans is referring to by the word “couple” is not merely two individuals qua individuals, but two individuals considered as having a close personal relationship of some sort.  In other words, the Declaration is using the term in just the way most people use it when discussing a romantic relationship, not in some broader sense and not in some technical sense either.

Now, the cardinal also goes on to say: “Couples are blessed.  The union is not blessed.”  This confirms that he intends to distinguish “couples” from “unions,” as many defenders of the Declaration have tried to do.  However, the cardinal says nothing to explain how there can be such a distinction – that is to say, he does not explain how this distinction is not merely verbal, a distinction without a difference like the distinction between “bachelors” and “unmarried men.” 

There are three problems here.  First, and again, Cardinal Fernández’s remarks confirm that by “couple,” what Fiducia Supplicans is referring to are two people considered as having some close personal relationship, and indeed one that may have had a sexual component of some sort at least in the past.  But that is also just what the term “union” is typically used to refer to!  So, how can one possibly bless a “couple” without blessing the “union”?  It is not enough simply to assert or assume that one can do so.  We still need an explanation of exactly what it means to bless the one and not the other.

Second, the cardinal says that in the blessings that Fiducia Supplicans has in view, “it is… asked that this friendship be purified, matured and lived in fidelity to the Gospel.”  In other words, the blessing is not merely on the individuals who make up the couple, but on their friendship itself.  And how can that possibly fail to be a blessing on the “union”?  True, it doesn’t follow that it is a blessing on the sexual aspect of the union, but that is irrelevant to the point at issue.  It still amounts to a blessing on the union itself, despite the cardinal’s claim that “the union is not blessed.”

Third, the Vatican’s 2021 document on the matter says that while “individual persons” in irregular relationships can be blessed, it “declares illicit any form of blessing that tends to acknowledge their unions as such.”  Hence, the older statement says that irregular unions not only cannot be blessed, they cannot so much as be acknowledged.  But as Cardinal Fernández’s remarks make clear, Fiducia Supplicans does permit acknowledgement of such unions.  For how can you bless “their friendship” without acknowledging it?  How can you bless a “couple” considered as “two very close friends” who may have had “some kind of sexual relationship” in the past and retain “a strong sense of belonging and mutual help,” without “acknowledging their union as such”?

Hence, the cardinal’s remarks in the interview do not refute, but rather reinforce, the judgment that the 2023 Declaration contradicts the 2021 statement.

There is yet another problem.  Again, the interview with Cardinal Fernández confirms that Fiducia Supplicans uses the word “couple” in the ordinary sense that entails not merely two individuals, but two individuals considered as having a personal relationship of a romantic kind, or at least of a kind that once had a romantic component.  Now, in the past, the Church has explicitly repudiated the contemporary tendency to expand this ordinary notion of a “couple” so that it includes same-sex and other irregular relationships.  For example, in Ecclesia in Europa, Pope St. John Paul II criticized “attempts… to accept a definition of the couple in which difference of sex is not considered essential.”  In a 2008 address, Pope Benedict XVI lamented that “so-called ‘de facto couples’ are proliferating.”  Insofar as Fiducia Supplicans uses “couples” to refer to same-sex and other irregular relationships, then, it accommodates the usage that these previous popes condemned.  In this way too, the new Declaration conflicts with past teaching.

Mike Lewis’s answer

In a recent article at Where Peter Is, Mike Lewis complained that “countless papal critics are acting as if they can’t understand the difference between a couple and a union” and mocks their “sudden inability to grasp the difference” as “a case of mass lexical amnesia.”  Oddly, though, his article does not tell us what this difference is, which should have been easy enough if the distinction really were, as he insists it is, obvious and long-standing.

It seems that even some Where Peter Is readers were unimpressed, which has now led Lewis to try to explain the difference in a follow-up article.  Much of what he writes essentially just reiterates, at length, that the new Declaration clearly says that it authorizes only blessings for couples and not for unions, and that “most reasonably intelligent Catholics should be able to understand the difference if they read the document with a spirit of receptivity and an open heart.”  Of course, this does not address the question at all.  Everybody already knows what the Declaration says.  The question is how any coherent sense can be made of what it says.  In particular, exactly what is the difference between a “couple” and a “union”?  Naturally, to accuse those who continue to ask this question of lacking “a spirit of receptivity and an open heart” is not to answer the question.

Lewis does take a stab at answering it, though.  He writes:

I don’t understand why this is a difficult concept, obviously a “couple” is two people who are paired together.  A couple might be married, engaged, or involved in another type of relationship.  A union is a type of arrangement or agreement between two people… The Church can bless two people who are a couple without sanctioning everything that they do, nor recognizing every agreement they make.

End quote.  I trust that most reasonably intelligent Catholics who read Lewis with a spirit of receptivity and an open heart will see that this utterly fails to solve the problem.  Start with the last sentence.  Yes, one can certainly “bless two people who are a couple without sanctioning everything that they do, nor recognizing every agreement they make.”  But one can also bless a union without sanctioning everything the people in it do or recognizing every agreement they make.  So, this does exactly nothing to explain the difference between blessing a couple and blessing a union.

Consider next Lewis’s claim that “a ‘couple’ is two people who are paired together.”  What does being “paired together” amount to?  Is Lewis saying that just any two individuals, even perfect strangers, who happen to be standing next to one another counts as a “couple” in the sense Fiducia Supplicans has in view?  I’ve already explained in my previous article why that can’t be right, and we just saw above that the interview with Cardinal Fernández confirms that it is not right.  “Couple” in this context means more than merely two individuals, and connotes a special relationship between them.  And Lewis may well acknowledge this, since he goes on to say that “a couple might be married, engaged, or involved in another type of relationship.”

But then, we must ask yet again, how does this differ from a union?  Lewis says, first, that a union “is a type of arrangement.”  I hardly need point out that that is so vague that it is obviously true of couples no less than of unions.  Couples, such as the married and engaged couples Lewis gives as examples, are obviously in a kind of “arrangement.”  So, this too does exactly nothing to clarify the difference between a “couple” and a “union.”

What, then, of Lewis’s further suggestion that a union involves an “agreement” of some kind?  This is slightly less vague than “arrangement,” but not enough to help.  Consider two people who decide to go steady, or to become engaged, or to share bed and board.  Any of these suffices to make them a “couple.”  But these all involve agreements of some type (as well as arrangements).  Hence, by Lewis’s criteria, this also suffices to make them a “union.”  Once again, then, Lewis has utterly failed to explain the difference between a “couple” and a “union.”

Later in the article, Lewis suggests that the blessings the Declaration has in view “are meant for each of the persons in the couple, not an attempt to legitimize a union” (emphasis in the original).  But what does this mean, exactly?  Does it mean that what the Declaration has in view are blessings on the persons considered only as individuals, rather than as a couple?  But we already saw above, and at greater length in my previous article, why that is not what the Declaration is saying.

Following a suggestion from another defender of Fiducia Supplicans, Lewis suggests:

Fiducia Supplicans studiously avoids explicitly focusing on the dichotomy between individuals and relationships... “It does not so much discuss who or what gets blessed, but what blessings are and for what purpose.”  This suggests that the fixation of the document’s critics on the word “couple” is entirely misplaced, and we should turn our attention to why we bless.

End quote.  The problem with this is that it is simply not true that the Declaration “does not so much discuss who or what gets blessed.”  On the contrary, the whole point of the Declaration is to go beyond what was already said in the 2021 document and assert that blessings can now be given to “couples” qua couples (and not merely to the individuals in the couple, as the 2021 document allowed).  Hence for critics to focus on the word “couple” is not only not misplaced, it is precisely to do what the new Declaration itself does.

In a closing section so absurd that the unwary reader might wonder whether his article is, after all, meant merely as a parody of desperate defenders of Fiducia Supplicans, Lewis tells us that he consulted ChatGPT to see how it might explain the difference between “couples” and “unions”!  The part of the AI software’s response that is actually relevant to this question reads as follows:

The Church may view the blessing of individuals in a same-sex relationship as a recognition of their inherent dignity and worth as persons… Therefore, the Church might differentiate between blessing a couple (as individuals) and blessing their union. (Emphasis added)

End quote.  So, the only way ChatGPT is able to make sense of the difference between blessing a “couple” and blessing a “union” is to suggest that the individuals in the couple are blessed as individuals, rather than as a couple.  The problem with this, of course, is that the 2021 document already allowed for that, and that the whole point of the new Declaration is to authorize the blessing of couples as couples.  Once again, I explained at length in my previous article how that is the case, and Cardinal Fernández has confirmed it in the Pillar interview. 

Explaining the difference between “couples” and “unions” thus eludes the best efforts of man and machine alike.