Pope Francis: Gay couples have right to civil unions

THE Pope has called for the establishment of legal unions for gay couples in a reversal of historic Catholic teaching.

Francis made the call in a documentary in which he declared: ‘Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family. They are children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out, or made miserable, because of it.’

He said the way to make gay families legitimate was to have a law similar to the civil partnerships system introduced in Britain in 2005 for same- sex couples. ‘What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered,’ the Pope said. ‘I stood up for that.’

The remarks will come as a shock to Roman Catholics who have accepted the Church’s stand against the worldwide advance of gay rights.

The interview was part of a documentary, Francesco, by Oscar-nominated director Evgeny Afineevsky, which was screened in Rome yesterday. It is due for wider broadcast at the weekend.

The statement signals that Francis is moving to shift the papacy and the church into more liberal thinking after seven years in which reform-minded Catholics have been hoping for a decisive rejection of social conservatism. Francis moved into the Vatican in 2013 after his conservative predecessor Benedict XVI became the first pope to resign in nearly 600 years.

In 2003, the Vatican declared that gay relationships were harmful and that it was ‘gravely immoral’ for politicians to support them.

It added that ‘legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behaviour, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity’.

The legal recognition of gay relationships in civil partnerships in Britain proved a short-lived stepping stone to the first same- sex marriages in 2014.

Francis opposed the idea of legal same- sex unions in Argentina a decade ago when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires. However, shortly after becoming Pope, he said of gay people that ‘we must be brothers’ and added: ‘If a person is gay and seeks God and has goodwill, who am I to judge him?’

In 2016 he told journalists that ‘the Church must not only apologise to a gay person it offended, but we must apologise to the poor, to women who have been exploited, to children forced into labour’.

‘They are the children of God’