In July 2013, Pope Francis posed a question that marked a radical shift in the Catholic Church’s treatment of gay people.
“If a person is gay and seeks God and has goodwill, who am I to judge him?” he asked reporters in 2013. “Who am I to judge?”
Francis died early Monday, the day after Easter, and LGBTQ Catholics and theologians recalled the comment as one of the first Francis made that promoted acceptance of queer people. It was a dramatic departure from the way the previous figureheads of the Holy See and church doctrine had often spoken about gay people, describing homosexuality as “an intrinsic moral evil” and an “objective disorder,” and the relatively accepting tone would go on to become a major theme of Francis’ papacy and, now, his complex legacy.
Francis would go on to urge parents not to condemn their gay children and approve priests’ blessing same-sex unions. However, “he wasn’t perfect” in the eyes of LGBTQ Catholics, said Jason Steidl Jack, an assistant teaching professor of religious studies at St. Joseph’s University, New York. Just after the “Who am I to judge?” remark, Francis said homosexuality is still a sin under Catholic doctrine. He also referred to gay people with slurs on at least two occasions, Steidl Jack said, and spoke negatively about what he called “gender ideology.” He also said blessings of same-sex couples couldn’t resemble traditional marriage vows.
But what made Francis’ papacy historic is that, unlike his predecessors, he met with LGBTQ people from around the world and listened to their stories.
“He could have conversations that just weren’t possible under John Paul II and Benedict XVI,” Steidl Jack said of the two popes before Francis. “As the years of his papacy went on, he seemed to get more open, both to gays and lesbians, but also to the trans community. This is a level of openness that was unthinkable before Pope Francis. It’s been a revolution of compassion, a revolution of welcome, and it’s changed the church. It’s changed the church’s relationship to the LGBTQ community.”
‘He sat and held our hands’
Francis’ positive remarks about the LGBTQ community were a “seismic shift” in the church’s treatment of gay and lesbian people, said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of DignityUSA, which advocates for LGBTQ rights within the Catholic Church.
In response to the organization’s advocacy, the Vatican issued a controversial “Letter to the Bishops on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” in 1986, which resulted in many of the organization’s chapters being expelled from their home parishes and barred from meeting on Catholic properties, Duddy-Burke said.
Nearly three decades later, the Vatican invited Duddy-Burke, who is also a co-chair of Global Network of Rainbow Catholics, an international organization of LGBTQ Catholics, and two other members of the organization to meet with Francis during a synod assembly in October 2023.
They talked to him about the importance of his statement earlier that year calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality worldwide, but told him that the sentiment needed to be implemented by Catholic bishops and politicians. They also told him LGBTQ people are often still excluded from Catholic churches, and discussed the importance of gender-affirming health care for transgender people.
“He was very warm, and he laughed with us, and he made eye contact through the whole thing,” Duddy-Burke said. “He sat and held our hands and hugged one of us.”
At the end of their meeting, Francis told them, in Italian, “Your work is important. Keep pressing on,” Duddy-Burke said through tears as she recalled the moment.
She said there was a huge public response to photos and news about the meeting, which “showed just how significant it was for representatives [of the community] to be seen with the pope.”
Michael O’Loughlin, author of “Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics, and the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear,” wrote a letter to Francis after O’Loughlin published his book to tell the pontiff about the conversations he had with Catholic nuns and priests who went against the teachings of the church at the time and worked behind the scenes to care for people dying from AIDS-related illnesses.
In August 2021, Francis wrote back. The letter was written in Spanish but was translated to English. He thanked O’Loughlin for shining a light on the priests, religious sisters and lay people who supported those who were sick from HIV and AIDS.
“Instead of indifference, alienation and even condemnation, these people let themselves be moved by the mercy of the Father and allowed that to become their own life’s work; a discreet mercy, silent and hidden, but still capable of sustaining and restoring the life and history of each one of us,” Francis wrote.
“I’ll always remember Francis for creating space for LGBT people to tell our own stories in the church,” said O’Loughlin, who is also the executive director of Outreach, an LGBTQ Catholic organization. “While some LGBT advocates point out that he maybe didn’t go far enough in what they had hoped he would do, he nonetheless created these opportunities for us to show that we want to live our lives in the church just like any other Catholics.”
Max Kuzma, a lifelong Catholic and transgender advocate, said he was also struck by Francis’ pastoral presence and compassion when he met the pontiff last year. Kuzma said he introduced himself to Francis, in Spanish, as a transgender man. It was a busy moment, Kuzma said, and Francis was being pushed along in his wheelchair, so he didn’t respond verbally.
“But it was his expression and the way that he grasped my hand,” Kuzma said. “I really felt that moment of acceptance and love and support, a very pastoral feeling when you look in the eyes of the pope.”
An uncertain future
Though Francis’ gestures of acceptance for LGBTQ people set an example for other Catholic Church leaders, Steidl Jack said, it’s unclear how far they will carry into the next papacy, because Francis didn’t fundamentally change church doctrine.
“If you open up the Catechism, it still describes homosexuality as intrinsically disordered, as something that goes against God’s purposes for human sexuality, and that is opposed to human flourishing,” Steidl Jack said. He added that after Francis issued the document allowing for blessings of same-sex couples, he faced backlash from priests in parts of Africa and Eastern Europe, and he was likely afraid that pushing for doctrinal change too quickly would cause a schism in the church.
Francis’ statements regarding LGBTQ people also haven’t been entirely positive and have often been contradictory. For example, at the start of the pandemic, Francis began meeting with trans women, many of them sex workers, at the Vatican. In 2023, he also said trans people can be baptized and can become godparents. However, in March 2024, he called “gender ideology” the “ugliest danger” of our time.
Kuzma said that statement, combined with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops praising President Donald Trump’s executive order barring trans women and girls from competing in female sports, makes him nervous about the future if the next pope is hostile toward trans people.
“That unhelpfully fed into some of the culture war stuff,” Kuzma said, especially in more conservative Catholic spaces, which Kuzma said he used to be a part of.
Still, Kuzma said he believes that if Francis had lived longer, he would’ve formed friendships with trans people in the way he formed a friendship with Juan Carlos Cruz, a survivor of clerical sexual abuse. In 2018, regarding Cruz being gay, Francis famously told him, “God made you like this.” In 2021, he appointed Cruz to a commission for protecting minors. Kuzma said such friendships would’ve likely changed Francis’ mind.
Steidl Jack agreed, saying that one of the major lessons from Francis’ pontificate was that he “didn’t get things right all the time,” but he was willing to listen.
“He was willing to spend time with people and accept them as they are,” Steidl Jack said. “I believe he grew from that, and I believe the church grew from that as well. And that’s where the church needs to continue growing. It’s a ministry of listening to, a ministry of openness. It’s a ministry of being willing to learn.”
