Francis becomes first pope to endorse same-sex civil unions
Pope Francis’ stance had the potential to shift debates about the legal status of same-sex couples in nations around the globe and unsettle some bishops.
Pope Francis expressed support for same-sex civil unions in remarks revealed in a documentary that premiered Wednesday. It was a significant break from his predecessors and staked out new ground for the church in its recognition of gay people.
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 same-sex 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 long-standing teaching of the church about same-sex unions,” said Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, Rhode Island, 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 Wednesday about when he had said them and to whom. The Vatican dismissed them as old news. Francis has a tendency for making off-thecuff 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
The remarks “in no way affects doctrine,” Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit priest and close ally of Francis told the television channel of the Italian bishops conference 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.
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 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 Wednesday, 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 same-sex 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 healthcare 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.
“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 homosexual 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.
“This is a major step forward in the church’s relationship with LGBTQ people,” said Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest who has written a book on how to make gay Catholics feel more welcome in the church.
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 Tobin, the Rhode Island bishop.