The Vatican announced on Monday that blessings for unions of same-sex people are “illicit” because God “cannot bless sin,” while blessings for individual persons with homosexual inclinations are permissible. The Vatican’s orthodoxy office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a formal response of “negative” to a question of whether the Catholic churches have the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex on March 15. Pope Francis approved this response. “It is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex,” the statement said. What is blessed should be “objectively and positively ordered to receive and express grace” according to …