Comments from Pope Francis, in which he apparently endorsed gay civil unions, on Thursday stirred debate among Catholics over whether he had departed from church teaching.
Francis, during an interview featured in the Italian documentary Francesco, said that civil unions must be “legally covered” and that in the past, he had “stood up” for recognizing couples under a “civil union law,” a reference to his time as archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina. The controversy arose from the fact that Francis, more than simply saying that the church would not fight against civil unions, seemingly endorsed them.
The Vatican did not comment on the Francis interview.
After numerous Catholic leaders speculated that the phrase “civil unions” had been misunderstood or misinterpreted, Argentinian Archbishop Victor Fernandez, a theologian close to Francis, said that the pope had an idiosyncratic understanding of the term. Fernandez wrote in a Facebook post that Francis’s position on civil unions is unchanged from when he was Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio and that the pope believes that marriage “only applies” to a union of man and woman.
“However, Bergoglio always recognized that, without calling it ‘marriage,’ there are indeed very close same-sex unions, which do not involve sexual intercourse, but a very intense and stable partnership,” Fernandez added. “They know each other thoroughly, they share the same roof for many years, they care, they sacrifice for each other.”
Fernandez said that these relationships can be called “civil unions” but only resemble what is commonly understood as the unification of same-sex couples in incidental ways, such as how they deal with the treatment of medical issues or how they settle inheritances. Francis had proposed accepting these sorts of unions between same-sex couples in 2010, but his fellow bishops had shot down the idea because it could be easily “confused with marriage,” Fernandez said.
Ryan Anderson, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and one of the leading opponents of gay marriage in the United States, also sought to interpret Francis’s comments, pointing to a similar argument that he, along with Princeton professor Robert George, made in 2009. There, like Francis had in Argentina, both Anderson and George argued for a non-sex-based form of civil unions designed to “protect adult domestic partners who have pledged themselves to a mutually binding relationship of care” legally.
Other defenders of the pope, both on Twitter and various Catholic media outlets, pointed out that the series of quotes attributed to the pope in the documentary are from multiple interviews and likely taken out of context. Francis, during the interview, which was not conducted by Evgeny Afineevsky, the documentary’s director, added that it was an “incongruity to speak of homosexual marriage.” Critics argued that key context had been left out of the interview’s presentation.
Partisans both for and against Francis also used the incident to score political points. Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and proponent of greater acceptance of gay people within the Catholic Church, promoted the interview as a “major step forward” for the Catholic Church. On the other side, Taylor Marshall, a popular traditionalist Catholic and one of the Trump campaign’s top ambassadors to Catholics, pointed to the incident as proof that there is an “infiltration” of gay leaders in the Catholic Church. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a frequent critic of Francis, said that the statements “do not correspond to the constant teaching of the Church” and condemned them for causing “confusion and error” among Catholics.
Views of Francis’s position on civil unions have evolved since he became pope. Before, as an Argentinian bishop, he was widely seen as conservative on the issue and was often criticized by gay activists. When Francis became pope, he commented on the issue broadly in 2014, saying that the church should look at civil unions and “evaluate each particular case.”
