Under Pope Leo XIV, the Vatican is continuing a friendlier approach to LGBTQ Catholics adopted during Pope Francis’s papacy.
While the Church has no intention of changing its doctrine on marriage — recognizing only unions between a man and a woman — the Vatican has signaled that it intends to continue Francis’s outreach to gay and lesbian Catholics rather than adopt a more condemnatory tone.
Catholic LGBTQ advocates were elated last week after a Vatican working group — comprised of theologians, bishops, priests, a sister, and a layperson — released a report featuring testimony from two gay married Catholics who spoke about their sexuality, faith, and the harm caused by the Church’s negative teachings on homosexuality.
The nonbinding report summarized the work of experts studying “controversial” issues — later renamed “emerging issues” — including homosexuality and the practice of active nonviolence, topics raised during the Synod on Synodality, a multi-year global process of listening and dialogue within the Catholic Church launched by Pope Francis.
As expected, the report did not announce major changes to Church doctrine, but suggested that the Church address the impasse between “doctrinal firmness” and “pastoral welcome” by incorporating insights from psychology alongside the Bible and Church doctrine.
More specifically, the report acknowledged the Catholic Church’s role in “the solitude, anguish, and stigma that accompany persons with same-sex attractions and their families,” and reflected on the negative impacts of so-called “reparative therapies,” another term for conversion therapy.
One of the gay men whose testimony was featured in the report, a Portuguese Catholic, spoke about coming to terms with his homosexuality and marrying his husband in a civil ceremony. He also recounted struggles with his faith stemming from insensitive remarks by a Catholic spiritual director and a negative experience with forced conversion therapy. The second man, an American, criticized the therapy and counseling he received from Courage, a Catholic pastoral group that encourages people with same-sex attraction to live chastely.
In a statement to the Associated Press, Courage decried the negative depiction of its work and denied ever engaging in conversion therapy.
“Courage has suffered calumny and detraction before, but usually from secular outlets,” the group said in its statement. “It is a great sadness and an additional wound to our members to have this false and unjust depiction in a Vatican document.”
The Rev. James Martin, an American Jesuit priest and founder of Outreach, an LGBTQ Catholic ministry, told the AP that the inclusion of LGBTQ testimony in the report marks a significant development because it signals an intention to continue outreach efforts begun under Pope Francis.
“It’s a big deal because they included testimonies and published testimonies from two LGBTQ people, both of them married, which is also unusual for the Vatican to do,” Martin told the National Catholic Reporter. “As far as I know, it’s the first time that in any official publication of the Vatican, they’ve included witnesses and testimonies and stories from LGBTQ Catholics in any kind of detailed way.”
He also noted that the report marked the first time he could recall seeing conversion therapy “critiqued that strongly” in an official Vatican document.
Leo has already signaled a friendlier, more conciliatory approach to the LGBTQ community despite comments he made more than a decade ago criticizing the “homosexual lifestyle” and the role of mass media in promoting acceptance of same-sex relationships that conflict with Church doctrine. During a news conference last month while flying back to Rome from Equatorial Guinea, Leo said he plans to emphasize Church teachings on “issues of justice, equality, and freedom” rather than “sexual matters.”
At the same time, Leo placed limits on the Church’s friendlier posture toward LGBTQ people, saying he will not endorse formal liturgical blessings — such as those performed during Mass or as part of a specific rite — for same-sex couples. Francis supported allowing priests to offer informal, spontaneous blessings to same-sex couples as long as those blessings did not equate same-sex unions with marriage.
But Leo’s friendlier, less doctrinaire approach has rankled conservatives within the Catholic community, who note that official Church teaching describes homosexual activity as “intrinsically disordered” — even as the Church has historically accepted that people may experience same-sex attraction so long as they remain celibate.
Bishop Joseph Strickland, whom Pope Francis removed as bishop of Tyler, Texas, blasted the Vatican working group’s report as “deeply alarming” and in conflict with Church teachings on sexuality, sin, marriage, and morality. Writing on his personal website, Strickland said: “To suggest that the sin does not consist in the same-sex relationship itself is not merely confusing language. It is a direct assault upon Catholic moral doctrine and upon the words of Scripture itself.”
Still, other LGBTQ Catholic advocates saw the report as a step toward greater inclusion.
“It’s a really good — I would even say historic — document,” Yunuen Trujillo, a lesbian lay minister from Los Angeles, told National Catholic Reporter. “It’s still calling for all Catholics to engage in a process of discernment that is respectful of people’s lived experiences.”
Subscribe free to Metro Weekly’s digital magazine for the LGBTQ stories that matter most.
