Cardinal Gerhard Müller recently reflected on the meaning of blessings: On God's blessing and the fake blessing of this world

...(T)he Church teaches that Christ died on the cross for the sins of all people and that the Holy Spirit withholds God's grace from no one who turns to the Gospel so that they may lead a new and holy life in the footsteps of Christ.

Only for this reason can the Apostle say to the baptized: “Do not live like the Gentiles in their futile thinking... Put off your old self, which is wasting away in deceitful desires; change your former way of life and renew your minds. Put on the new self, created in the image of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:17, 22–24).

In the context of the Synods of Bishops and the national-synodal processes in the local churches, a favorite topic of certain bishops, theologians, and contemporary laypeople repeatedly surfaces. Instead of leading people to the God-man Jesus Christ, the one and true mediator between God and humanity, they see the future of the Church, in a monothematic and spiritually limited way, in the adoption of gender and rainbow ideologies. Therefore, they even risk the visible unity of the Church in the truth of Christ, as the Lord himself, as head of the Church, entrusted it to the entire College of Bishops, with and under the Pope as the personal successor of Peter on the Roman Cathedra.

The private or even paraliturgical blessing of same-sex and opposite-sex couples in irregular relationships is based on the heretical denial of the revealed truth that God created humankind as male and female. And Jesus, who in his person is the way, the truth, and the life, confirmed the original will of the Creator against the Pharisees' casuistry on divorce and definitively revealed that man and woman become one flesh only through the marital vows (cf. Mt 19:3–9). Thus, in marriage, man and woman form a personal and sexual unity in mutual love, in their shared life, and in their openness to the children God desires to give them. And only man and woman in marital unity are blessed by God so that they may be fruitful, multiply, populate the earth, and (wisely) rule over all other creatures on earth (cf. Gen 1:28).

There is no mention, either in Sacred Scripture or in the entire Tradition of the Church, of blessing people in adulterous relationships—and certainly not of authorizing bishops to order or permit fraudulent and blasphemous blessings. The liturgical or private blessing (benedictio = approval) with which we are blessed in Christ is a prayer of the Church, trusting in God's help and assistance for people so that they may be encouraged in all that is good, and by no means an endorsement of an ungodly life of sin. Human weakness can be no excuse, because the Holy Spirit helps us with his grace, which God does not withhold from anyone who earnestly asks him for it (cf. Rom 8:26).

But of those who “exchange the truth of God for a lie” and replace God’s order with their own ideologies and self-constructed pseudo-theologies mixed with sociology and psychology, the Apostle says that they think wrongly and live in sin, which means the death of the life of grace; and that, knowing their wrong actions, they still agree with those who act in such a contradiction to God (cf. Rom 1:25, 32).

...Anyone who, as a teacher of the faith appointed by Christ and a shepherd of the faithful, is truly interested in the inner peace and eternal salvation of the believers entrusted to their care, does not make people in difficult situations pawns of a godless ideology or instruments of their self-promotion within the woke community, but rather points them personally to Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect was tempted as we are yet did not sin. Let us therefore, with confidence, approach the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and grace and receive help in due time” (Hebrews 4:15-16). For he alone is the true Messiah, and he alone can help people without exception from every spiritual distress and all emotional strain—unlike the worldly saviors who, with their doctrines of self-redemption, have so often been the downfall of humanity.

Gender ideology directly contradicts Christian anthropology. And with its arbitrarily invented 60–80 genders, it also directly contradicts biological science. It violates common sense, which knows that every individual human being originates from the union of their own father and their own mother. With the woke ideology, originally stemming from atheistic-materialistic thought, a destructive heresy and a schismatic divisive force has infiltrated the Catholic Church, comparable in the extent of its contradiction to the revealed truth of God to Manichaeism or Pelagianism.

And the study of church history teaches us that only through the continuous resistance of the Magisterium of the Popes and Councils, and the intellectual power of the great Church Fathers from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman, could these and other existential threats to the Church be averted. All man-made empires and atheistic strongholds of thought must fall sooner or later. But the gates of hell cannot overcome the Church, because Jesus, the Son of the living God, built it on the rock of St. Peter.

It is not the transformation of the Church into a philanthropic movement with a religious-social slant that will lead the secularized people of the de-Christianized West back into the open arms of the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ, who is the "Light of the Nations." Only the Council Fathers of the Second Vatican Council can be said to express this desire: "To enlighten all people with the glory of the Church, which shines on the face of her as she proclaims the Gospel to all creation." (Lumen Gentium 1)

The true disciples of Jesus do not seek the approval of people or the fake blessing of the "powerful, famous, and influential of this world" (cf. 1 Cor 2:6). For in love and truth, "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has blessed us with every blessing of his Spirit through our fellowship with Christ in heaven" (Eph 1:3).

Cardinal Müller is the former Cardinal-Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

NOTE: Any attempt to bless serious sin, attempting to co-opt God to sinful behavior, is a sin of blasphemy, mocking God the Creator. God will not be mocked. God will forgive serious sin through true repentance.

Catechism of the Catholic Church

1677 Sacramentals are sacred signs instituted by the Church. They prepare men to receive the fruit of the sacraments and sanctify different circumstances of life.

1678 Among the sacramentals, blessings occupy an important place. They include both praise of God for his works and gifts, and the Church's intercession for men that they may be able to use God's gifts according to the spirit of the Gospel.

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