“Who am I to judge?”
Pope Francis uttered those words in July 2013, just four and a half months into his papacy, when he was asked about gay priests, and the remark was greeted by some observers as a revelation and revolution. At long last, the Roman Catholic Church’s formal disapproval and hypocritical denunciations of gay men and lesbians might be coming to a close.
But it wasn’t that simple. The church’s dealings with gay people are never that simple. They’re an infuriating paradox of blessings and shaming, grace and cruelty, provisionally opened arms and persistently closed doors. And Francis, more than any of the popes before him, became the mouthpiece of that muddle.
To wit: He later decided that he was one to judge, and last year, in a closed-door meeting with Catholic bishops, he reportedly responded to a question about whether gay men should be admitted into seminaries by saying that such training grounds for future priests were already lousy with “frociaggine,” a homophobic slur.
But then, instead of denying news accounts of that insult, he took the extraordinary step of apologizing for it.
During his 12 years as the church’s official leader, Francis nudged — no, yanked — the church toward a more modern perspective and greater acceptance of gay people. There’s no debating that. His efforts along those lines complemented his image as a refreshing counterpoint to Pope Benedict, the stern moralist (“God’s Rottweiler” was a popular nickname for him) whose resignation preceded Francis’ election. Francis was the pope less bound by ancient dogma. The pope more in touch with contemporary mores. The warm, affable pope. God’s Labradoodle.
And that demeanor extended to many statements and stands that exhorted Catholics to regard and respect gay and lesbian people as cherished members of the flock. But for every advance, there was an asterisk, and for every proclamation of love, a delineation of limits, so that Francis — who died on Monday at the age of 88 — personified the indelible tension in the church’s official teaching about homosexuality, which he never squarely renounced. That teaching holds that being gay isn’t a sin but that acting on those feelings is “intrinsically disordered.”
That’s tough to get your head around in the abstract. It’s even more difficult if you’ve spent much time in the church and with its clergy. I have — from my days as an altar boy through decades of journalism, including a 1993 book, “A Gospel of Shame,” about the church’s child sexual abuse crisis, and a stint covering the Vatican for The Times when I was its Rome bureau chief from 2002 to 2004.
My reporting validated the widespread perception that the priesthood was populous with gay men — many celibate, some not — and that the ranks of nuns included many lesbians. It also made clear to me that many of the superiors of those priests and nuns knew as much and were untroubled by it, no matter their public positions and remarks. I’d call the prevalence of gays and lesbians among Catholic orders an open secret, except it wasn’t particularly secretive; it was more like a discreet understanding. Roman Catholicism depended crucially on a whole class of people whose identities it repeatedly called into question. That’s what I mean by “hypocritical.”
When covering the church, I often found myself across a lunch or dinner table from a priest who recognized that I was gay, communicated his unalloyed comfort with that and spoke in a way that assumed my awareness that he was gay, too. The ease of it all moved — but also baffled — me. His very existence in the church seemed to me a mixed message.
Which was precisely what Francis delivered. Under him the hypocrisy was diluted, the most flagrant vilification of gay people sternly discouraged, the instances of outreach many and earnest. But there was always that one giant roadblock, that immovable oxymoron: Good Catholics were supposed to embrace gay people but not their gayness. That’s hardly the arithmetic of equality. And I could see how it and the church leaders who clung to it constrained Francis — how he was tied into knots.
In fits and starts, Francis found his way to a green light for priests to bless same-sex couples — something that gay Catholics had long wanted. But what a wan shade of green it was. My Times colleague Jason Horowitz’s description of the policy change in a 2023 article about it reads almost like a spoof. According to the new rule, he wrote, the blessing was “not the same as a marriage sacrament” and was “not blessing the relationship.” “To avoid confusion,” he added, “blessings should not be imparted during or connected to the ceremony of a civil or same-sex union or when there are ‘any clothing, gestures or words that are proper to a wedding’.” Also, blessings were best imparted “during a meeting with a priest, a visit to a shrine, during a pilgrimage or as a prayer recited in a group.” That’s what I mean by “muddle.”
On the one hand, Francis angered many cardinals and bishops by speaking against the criminalization of same-sex activity, which is still prohibited by law in many countries with significant Catholic populations. On the other, he spoke in favor of children being reared by heterosexual couples, suggesting that a child was best off with a mother and father, not two mothers or two fathers.
It was as though he was moving toward some reconciliation he could never quite reach, his erratic, fettered progress captured by the title that New Ways Ministry, an advocacy group for gay and lesbian Catholics, once gave to a timeline of highlights and lowlights: “The Many Faces of Pope Francis.”
The face on those seemingly epochal July 2013 words, spoken during an extended back-and-forth with the Vatican press corps, was a humble, open, smiling one. Francis’ full sentence: “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”
“Gay” wasn’t a vernacular that popes before him had publicly used. The “good will” part, the “judge” bit — they suggested such tenderness, such decency. He was indeed a tender, decent man.
But he was a man of his church and of his generation, steeped in the bigotries of both. He gave me and many other gay people hope. Then he reminded us of why we never look to his church for our dignity.
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Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram Threads @FrankBruni • Facebook
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