21 April 2025
Statement from Bernard Schlager, PhD, CLGS Executive Director
The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion (CLGS) mourns the passing today of Pope Francis (1936-2025), who was elected pope in 2013 and made modest but significant advances in LGBTQ inclusion.
Francis will be remembered as a pope who brought a genuinely pastoral touch to his papacy, showing concern for marginalized communities while navigating the tensions between traditional Catholic teaching and more progressive Catholic theologies calling for the full inclusion of LGBTQ persons. The pope’s 2020 endorsement of civil unions for same-sex couples marked a significant, if limited, shift in the Vatican’s position on LGBTQ rights.
As I wrote in October 2020, Francis’s support for civil unions could be “taken as a positive, albeit small, step in the Catholic Church’s long and decidedly negative relationship with lesbian and gay people.” His statement that homosexuals “have a right to be a part of the family” since they are “children of God” offered hope to many LGBTQ Catholics who have long felt excluded from – and even abandoned by – their church.
Throughout his papacy, however, Francis maintained a fundamental opposition between civil recognition and sacramental blessing for same-sex couples. The Church under his leadership continued to teach that same-sex relationships could not be considered sacramental marriages, and official church doctrine continues to maintain that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.”
This contradictory stance – offering civil recognition while withholding sacred affirmation –exemplifies the limitations of Francis’s approach to LGBTQ inclusion. Again, as I noted in 2020, this position played into “the long-standing division between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular,’” whereas “heterosexual sacramental marriages are equated with the ‘holy’ while homosexual civil unions are something much less.”
Despite these limitations, Francis’s papacy represented important progress in Catholic teaching and the church’s approach to pastoral care when compared to his predecessors. His famously quoted “Who am I to judge?” response regarding gay priests signaled a shift in tone, even as doctrinal changes during his pontificate remained less significant.
For LGBTQ people in predominantly Catholic countries, Francis’s support for civil protections offered meaningful reinforcement of basic human rights claims, and his influence extended beyond theological debates to practical matters of legal protection, social acceptance, and the care of LGBTQ persons and their families.
At CLGS, we continue our call for all religious institutions to recognize the full humanity and spiritual dignity of LGBTQ people. While acknowledging the important steps that Francis took, we continue to advocate for a comprehensive inclusion that fully embraces LGBTQ persons and our families as worthy of love, respect, and inclusion in all faith communities.
As the Catholic Church enters a period of transition, we urge the next pontiff to build upon Pope Francis’ significant steps towards acceptance and inclusion for LGBTQ people. And we call upon the next shepherd of the Catholic Church to build a church where everyone has “a right to be a part of the family” and all persons, LGBTQ people included, are celebrated and respected as “children of God.”
Bernard Schlager, PhD
Executive Director, Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion