Pope Francis was a champion for gay people

Revisiting the Church’s Teaching about Homosexuality: A Conversation with Pope Francis Bergoglio during his Bianchi Type Ia Episcopal Convention

In the first year after he was elected pope, Bergoglio took the name Francis after St. Francis of Assisi. In doing so, he signaled a desire to cast his lot with the poor and those on the margins. He would do more for L.G.B.T.Q. people than all his predecessors combined.

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. Francis, who died on Monday at age 88, personified the tension of the church’s official teaching about homosexuality, as he never clearly repudiated it. That teaching holds that being gay isn’t a sin but that acting on those feelings is “intrinsically disordered.”

Those who doubt the effectiveness of his approach need only to look at the increasing number of L.G.B.T.Q. groups and retreats in many parishes, as well as prominent church leaders who have grown more vocal in their support — though still mainly in the West. Cardinal Wilton Gregory apologized for the way the church mistreated the L.G.B.T.Q. people. L.G.B.T.Q. people were added to the official list of events for this year’s Jubilee celebrations in Rome.

The reporting made me believe that there were many gay men and women in the priesthood and that the ranks of nuns included many lesbians. It made it clear to me that many of the superiors of those priests and nuns were not perturbed 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. A whole class of people who had different identities were dependent on Roman Catholicism. 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 made me confused. His very existence in the church seemed to me a mixed message.