Praying Without Confessing: The Prayers of Love and Faith, Synodal Ambiguity, and the Catholic Mirror
In early February 2026, a significant moment in the Church of England’s continuing debate over sexuality and doctrine occurred when John Dunnett, National Director of the Church of England Evangelical Council, resigned his honorary canonry at Chelmsford Cathedral. The resignation followed the cathedral’s decision to use the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) in public worship, despite objections raised by Dunnett and others within the diocese.
The Prayers of Love and Faith are a set of liturgical resources commended by the House of Bishops of the Church of England following the Living in Love and Faith process. They are intended for use with same-sex couples who wish to pray before God and receive a blessing within the Church’s worshipping life. The bishops maintain that these prayers do not constitute marriage rites and do not alter the Church’s formal doctrine, which continues to define marriage as a lifelong union between one man and one woman.¹
Dunnett’s resignation has drawn attention not because it represents a wave of similar departures, but because it crystallises a central theological tension within Anglicanism: whether a Church can coherently maintain a settled doctrinal definition of marriage while authorising liturgical prayers that appear, in practice, to affirm relationships outside that definition.
What the Church of England Officially Maintains
The Church of England’s position rests on a series of carefully maintained distinctions. The Prayers of Love and Faith are described as optional pastoral resources rather than doctrinal instruments; they are said to bless individuals rather than relationships; and they are presented as acts of accompaniment rather than moral or sacramental endorsement. Doctrine, the bishops insist, remains unchanged.¹
The controversy arises precisely because these distinctions are contested. Once prayers are authorised for public worship — particularly in cathedrals — critics argue that the line between pastoral provision and doctrinal teaching cannot be maintained.
Evangelical Anglican Objections: Scripture and Moral Clarity
Conservative evangelical Anglicans approach PLF through a framework shaped primarily by Scripture and moral obedience. From this standpoint, the biblical witness consistently restricts sexual intimacy to marriage between a man and a woman, and there is no positive warrant for blessing same-sex unions.²
For evangelicals, blessing is not morally neutral. In Scripture, blessing signifies divine favour upon an ordered good. To bless a relationship is therefore to affirm its moral legitimacy. The attempt to distinguish between blessing persons and blessing their union is rejected as artificial, since the prayer is inseparable from the relational reality it names.
Evangelical critics further argue that PLF weaken the Church’s pastoral duty to call sinners to repentance and conversion, substituting reassurance for transformation.
Traditional-Catholic Anglican Objections: Liturgy, Ontology, and Coherence
Traditional-catholic Anglicans arrive at similar conclusions through sacramental theology. Rooted in the principle lex orandi, lex credendi, they argue that public prayer is never doctrinally neutral. What the Church authorises itself to pray, it teaches.³
From this perspective, it is incoherent to claim that doctrine remains unchanged while liturgical practice embodies a moral vision that departs from that doctrine. In catholic theology, a blessing is not sentimental affirmation but an invocation of divine order toward a proper end. Sexual difference is constitutive of marriage, not incidental. A relationship lacking that form cannot be sacramentally ordered or blessed without contradiction.
Traditionalists also warn that allowing divergent liturgical practices fractures the Church’s common rule of prayer and reduces catholic unity to managed disagreement.
Different Premises, a Shared Judgment
Evangelicals and traditional-catholics differ profoundly in authority, method, and theology. Yet they converge on a single judgment: that the Prayers of Love and Faith introduce a rupture between what the Church professes and what it authorises itself to pray.
This convergence is instructive. When traditions that otherwise share little ground reach the same conclusion, it usually indicates that a foundational ecclesial principle is under strain.
The Catholic Mirror: Blessings, Synodality, and Pastoral Method
The Anglican dispute cannot be viewed in isolation. Its significance lies in what it reveals about a broader ecclesial method now visible within Catholicism itself.
Under Pope Francis, and articulated through the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith under Víctor Manuel Fernández, the Catholic Church has authorised a new pastoral framework for blessings through the declaration Fiducia Supplicans. That document insists that doctrine on marriage remains unchanged, while permitting non-ritual blessings of persons — including persons who present themselves together as couples — provided that such blessings do not resemble liturgical rites or imply moral endorsement.⁵
Formally, important distinctions remain. Catholic doctrine on marriage is dogmatically defined; homosexual acts continue to be taught as intrinsically disordered; and no Catholic rite comparable to PLF has been authorised. Yet the ecclesial logic now mirrors the Anglican trajectory in method if not yet in form.
In both cases, a pastoral practice is introduced that appears to affirm what doctrine still excludes, while the burden of preserving coherence is shifted onto distinctions of intention, spontaneity, and form. The distinction between blessing “persons” and blessing “relationships” — already rejected by traditional Anglican critics — now occupies the same fragile position in Catholic moral reasoning.
The difference is largely one of timing. Anglicanism confronts the lex orandi problem immediately because PLF are public rites. Catholicism defers the reckoning by insisting that blessings remain spontaneous and non-liturgical. Yet repetition normalises, normalisation catechises, and catechesis shapes belief. What is permitted pastorally soon becomes experienced ecclesially.
Governance by Ambiguity
The deeper issue exposed by both cases is not sexuality alone, but governance. When doctrine cannot be advanced openly, it is approached obliquely through practice. When clarity becomes costly, ambiguity becomes policy. Authority is exercised not to resolve contradiction, but to manage it.
History suggests that such strategies do not preserve unity. They merely postpone fracture, while dissolving confidence in the Church’s teaching authority.⁴
Conclusion
The controversy over the Prayers of Love and Faith reveals a truth that extends beyond Anglicanism. A Church cannot indefinitely sustain a division between what it professes and what it prays, or between what it teaches and what it permits itself to bless.
For Catholics, the Anglican experience functions as a warning already partially realised. Synodality detached from doctrinal clarity does not deepen communion; it erodes it. A Church that blesses without defining, accompanies without converting, and governs by ambiguity rather than truth risks losing not only coherence, but credibility.
¹ Church of England, House of Bishops, Prayers of Love and Faith: Pastoral Guidance (Church House Publishing, December 2023), esp. §§1–6 and §§12–15; see also General Synod Papers GS 2328 (February 2024), §§3–9, and GS 2355 (July 2024), §§5–11.
² Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC), Statement on the Prayers of Love and Faith (February 2023), §§2–6; General Synod Official Report, Group of Sessions, February 2023, LLF debate, Items 28–34.
³ Forward in Faith, Statement on the Prayers of Love and Faith (2023), §§4–9; see also GS Misc 1346, §§18–22, invoking lex orandi, lex credendi.
⁴ General Secretariat of the Synod, For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, Mission — Final Document of the XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops (26 October 2024), esp. §§3–6, §§52–55, and §67.
⁵ Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration Fiducia Supplicans: On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings (18 December 2023), §§11–13, §§31–33, §§36–39; approved in forma specifica by Pope Francis.
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