[ealgeone]

Didn’t the duly elected pope say it’s ok to bless couples in same sex relationships? That’s the head of Roman Catholicism. Kinda nullifies what they claim about the magisterium doesn’t it.

[metmom]

He sure did......

Still trying to find where in Catholics theology they are given permission to make personal decisions about whether they recognize their pope as legitimate or not.

[Cronos]

Actually Pope Francis (who is a putz, let me say that) didn't say "it's ok to bless couples in same sex relationships" - the Fiducia Supplicans is a mess of a document and it is so ambiguous to be meaningless - and that fault is Francis' completely. However, if you actually read through the document it says

• From a strictly liturgical point of view, a blessing requires that what is blessed be conformed to God’s will, as expressed in the teachings of the Church.
• since the Church has always considered only those sexual relations that are lived out within marriage to be morally licit, the Church does not have the power to confer its liturgical blessing when that would somehow offer a form of moral legitimacy to a union that presumes to be a marriage or to an extra-marital sexual practice.
  
  
• it is essential to grasp the Holy Father’s concern that these non-ritualized blessings never cease being simple gestures that provide an effective means of increasing trust in God on the part of the people who ask for them, careful that they should not become a liturgical or semi-liturgical act, similar to a sacramen
  
  
• one should neither provide for nor promote a ritual for the blessings of couples in an irregular situation.
  
  
• when the prayer of blessing is requested by a couple in an irregular situation, even though it is expressed outside the rites prescribed by the liturgical books, this blessing should never be imparted in concurrence with the ceremonies of a civil union, and not even in connection with them. Nor can it be performed with any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding.The same applies when the blessing is requested by a same-sex couple.
  
  

I agree that this is a complete pigs-meal of a document that in the end says absolutely nothing but confuses everyone. But that's the point - it says nothing except two points:

1. that you can bless people to get them closer to God and
2. that these are not civil unions nor couple blessings