Homosexuals Have a Right to Be a Part of the Family, Says Pope Francis
By Jason Horowitz
Oct. 21,
2020
Pope
Francis expressed support for same-sex civil unions in remarks revealed in a
documentary film that premiered on Wednesday, a significant break from his
predecessors that staked out new ground for the church in its recognition of
gay people.
Francis
has previously spoken about same-sex unions, opposing gay marriage.
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The
remarks, coming from the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, had the potential
to shift debates about the legal status of same-sex couples in nations around
the globe and unsettle bishops worried that the unions threaten what the church
considers traditional marriage — between one man and one woman.
“What we
have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered,”
Francis said in the documentary, “Francesco,” which debuted at the Rome Film
Festival, reiterating his view that gay people are children of God. “I stood up
for that.”
Many gay
Catholics and their allies outside the church welcomed the pope’s remarks,
though Francis’ opposition to gay marriage within the church remained absolute.
His
conservative critics within the church hierarchy, and especially in the
conservative wing of the church in the United States, who have for years
accused him of diluting church doctrine, saw the remarks as a reversal of
church teaching.
“The pope’s
statement clearly contradicts what has been the longstanding teaching of the
church about same-sex unions,” said Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, R.I.,
adding that the remarks needed to be clarified.
There was
little doubt that Francis, recorded on camera, made the statements during his
pontificate. But there was confusion on Wednesday about when he had said them
and to whom. The Vatican dismissed them as old news.
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Francis has
a tendency for making off-the-cuff public remarks, a trait that maddens both
supporters and critics alike. The comments shown in the film are likely to
generate exactly the sort of discussion the pope has repeatedly sought to
foster on issues once considered forbidden in the church’s culture wars.
Francis had
already drastically shifted the tone of the church on questions related to
homosexuality, but he has done little on policy and not changed teaching for a
church that sees its future growth in the Southern Hemisphere, where the
clerical hierarchy is generally less tolerant of homosexuality.
The remark
“in no way affects doctrine,” the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit priest and
close ally of Francis, told the television channel of the Italian bishops
conference on Wednesday evening.
The remarks
in the documentary were in keeping with Francis’ general support for gay
people, but were perhaps his most specific and prominent on the issue of civil
unions, which even traditionally Catholic nations like Italy, Ireland and
Argentina have permitted in recent years.
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The
director of the documentary, Evgeny Afineevsky, told The New York Times that
Francis had made the remarks directly to him for the film. He did not reply to
a question about when the remarks were made by the pope.
The Vatican
and allies of Francis publicly cast doubt on the notion that the pope said the
remarks to Mr. Afineevsky, asserting that the pontiff instead had made them to
a Mexican journalist, Valentina Alazraki, in an interview in the Vatican in May
2019. Earlier on Wednesday, Ms. Alazraki had told The Times that she did not
recall the pope making the comments to her.
In 2010, as
Argentina was on the verge of approving gay marriage, Francis, then cardinal
archbishop of Buenos Aires, supported the idea of civil unions for gay couples.
As pope in
2014, he told the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s largest newspaper, that nations
legalizing civil unions did so mostly to give same-sex partners legal rights
and health care benefits and that he couldn’t express a blanket position.
“You have
to see the different cases and evaluate them in their variety,” he said then.
But
Francis’ remarks in the documentary, explicitly supporting civil unions as pope
and on camera, had the potential for much greater impact on the debate over the
recognition of gay couples by the church.
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“Homosexuals
have a right to be a part of the family,” Francis says at another point in the
documentary. “They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody
should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it.”
Church
teaching does not consider being gay a sin, but it does consider homosexual
acts as “intrinsically disordered” and by extension holds that a homosexual
orientation is “objectively disordered.”
Church
doctrine also explicitly states that marriage is between a man and a woman, a
teaching Francis unwaveringly supports.
A
celebration at the announcement of the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of
same-sex marriage in Washington in 2015.Credit...Zach Gibson/The New York Times
Francis’
predecessors had also expressed their opposition, though, to civil unions.
In 2003,
under the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, the church’s Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, its doctrinal watchdog then led by the future Pope
Benedict XVI, issued “Considerations regarding proposals to give legal
recognition to unions between homosexual persons.”
The
document read, “The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot
lead in any way to approval of homosexual behavior or to legal recognition of
homosexual unions.”
Those views
were not incorporated into church teaching, but bishops and some bishops
conferences, which can be politically influential in certain countries, often
opposed civil unions as a threat to the church’s view of traditional marriage.
Advocates
within the church for civil unions seized on the pope’s remarks in the
documentary as a major blow to those efforts and as a breakthrough in the
church’s long-painful relationship with gay people.
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“This is a
major step forward in the church’s relationship with L.G.B.T.Q. people,” said
the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest who has written a book on how to make
gay Catholics feel more welcome in the Church, and who has met with the pope
and served as a consultor for the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications.
“It’s going
to be harder for bishops to say that same-sex civil unions are a threat against
marriage,” he said. “This is unmistakable support.”
Some of the
pope’s most consistent critics inside the Catholic hierarchy agreed that the
pope seemed to support civil unions, and they were vexed by it.
“The church
cannot support the acceptance of objectively immoral relationships,” said
Bishop Tobin of Providence.
But the
pope’s remarks do not mean he has altered church teaching on the subject, and
Francis has a track record of making encouraging remarks for gay people.
Starting in
2013, on a papal flight back from Brazil, his openness to gay people stunned
the faithful inside the church, and secular fans outside of it, who were more
accustomed to doctrinaire scoldings about homosexuality and gay marriage.
“Who am I
to judge,” Francis famously answered when asked about a supposedly gay priest
on that flight.
“Who am I
to judge,” Francis famously answered when asked about an allegedly gay priest
on a flight back from Brazil in 2013.Credit...Pool photo by Luca Zennaro
In his
landmark 2016 document on the theme of family — titled “Amoris Laetitia,” or
“The Joy of Love” — Francis rejected same-sex marriage, yet called on priests
to be welcoming to people in non-traditional relationships, such as gay people,
single parents and unmarried straight couples who live together.
He also
once told Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean sexual abuse survivor and gay person whom
he befriended, and who is featured in the documentary, that “God made you this
way and loves you this way, and the pope loves you this way.”
But under
Francis, the church also rejected what it cast as the notion that individuals
can choose their gender, and he also told the leaders of seminaries that it was
better not to admit gay candidates.
“If you
have the slightest doubt, it’s better to refuse them,” he once said. “Better
that they live the ministry or their consecrated life than that they live a
double life.”
Critics
pointed out that his church’s rules forced gay priests into a double life.
But those who
support the church being more welcoming of gay couples were pleased by the
pope’s remarks in the film.
“A pope
sets the tone for the church and what he is doing is signaling to bishops and
church leaders that a welcome for gay and lesbian couples has to go forward,”
said Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, an
organization of L.G.B.T. Catholics.
He noted
that in the United States, the Supreme Court was poised to weigh whether
Philadelphia may exclude a Catholic agency that does not work with same-sex
couples from the city’s foster-care system. In Germany’s more liberal Catholic
hierarchy, bishops had built momentum in their push to bless same-sex unions.
Those deliberations and others, he hoped, would be influenced by the pope’s remarks.
“They will
ripple through the church and legislatures and courts and the personal and
spiritual lives of Catholics who have been waiting for years and decades for an
affirming word from their church leader,” Mr. DeBernardo said. “The
significance is immense.”
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Elizabeth Dias contributed reporting from
Washington, and Ruth Graham from Warner, N.H.
Original Headline: Pope Francis, in Shift for
Church, Voices Support for Same-Sex Civil Unions
Source: The New York Times
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