On same-sex unions, Pope Francis must navigate a divided church

Pope Francis delivered a disappointment to Catholic LGBT communities Monday, with a decree reaffirming that priests should not bless samesex unions.

The move stood in contrast to the pontiff’s past statements calling for the legalization of same-sex unions and urging inclusion – part of a shift toward an incrementally more welcoming tone toward gay people in the church.

The more conciliatory rhetoric has stopped short of doctrinal changes. Monday’s proclamation labeled samesex unions as “illicit” and “not ordered to the Creator’s plans.”

As the pope charts the church’s course on LGBT issues, he must navigate precipitous divides. According to the Pew Research Center, in the United States, about 60% of Catholics support same-sex marriage, as of 2019. The level of supported is even higher across much of Western Europe. In the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain and Spain, more than three-quarters of Catholics supported same-sex marriage.

But in Eastern Europe – particularly in Baltic countries – a significant majority of Catholics oppose samesex marriage. In Bosnia and Ukraine, less than 10% of Catholics are in favor of the same-sex marriage.

Another 2019 Pew survey found an a wide international split over social acceptance of homosexuality. In Argentina, where Francis was born, 80% of Catholics said society should be accepting of homosexuality. In Lebanon, 14% said so.

There are 29 countries or territories in the world where same-sex marriage is legal, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Those places are mostly in Western Europe or the Americas, also regions where opinion and social support of the LGBT community is high.

While membership of the Catholic church in Europe and the United States is declining, it is growing in parts of Africa and Asia – places where the pope’s sentiments of sympathy for LGBT Catholics may not meet the widespread welcome they often do among liberal Catholics in the West.

Pope Francis “has to look at the global church. And there are certain regions in the world where if he had said, ‘yeah let’s do this,’ they would be schismatic at this point,” said Gerard J. McGlone, a senior research fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs.

Reformers in the church have long encountered this division.

“African Catholics, or Christians in the Middle East, hit the roof when someone says that same-sex partnerships should be equal to marriage,” Theo Hipp, a priest based in the German city of Mannheim, told Deutsche Welle last year. German bishops have been conducting a multiyear reevaluation of the Catholic church’s stances on practices including celibacy, women in leadership and homosexuality – much to the institution’s more conservative members’ chagrin.

“I think Africa is where the future is really [for the Catholic Church],” Nicolette Manglos-Weber, assistant professor of religion and society at Boston University’s School of Theology, told the BBC.

But many countries in Africa still enforce colonial-era laws that bar same-sex relations or marriage. South Africa remains the only nation on the continent where same-sex marriage is legal, after parliament approved the practice in 2006. And in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, only 6% of Catholics say they are accepting of homosexuality, according to Pew. Still, many liberal Catholics said they felt betrayed by Monday’s remarks.

Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, America’s largest spiritual community of gay Catholics, told The Washington Post it is “hard for a lot of people to understand just how far removed the church is from human rights advances that are being made in the rest of society.”

Others were unsurprised. “This isn’t a waffling back-and-forth from Pope Francis,” said Steve White, a fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. “This is totally consistent with statements like ‘Who am I to judge?’ People who don’t see that are misunderstanding the pope.”