Pope Francis, who died today at age 88, will be remembered for his efforts to make the church a more welcoming place, especially for people who have not always been able to see themselves as part of the institution. For LGBTQ Catholics, this will be particularly true. I have seen it in my own life.
This weekend, my family will gather to celebrate the baptism of our younger nephew. In many ways, our gathering will be no different than that of centuries of Christian families who came before us. We will pray. The priest will sprinkle holy water. The baby will probably cry. But at this particular ceremony, both my husband and I will witness the ritual as godfathers, a reality made possible only because Pope Francis encouraged my family and a parish priest to imagine a more welcoming church for LGBTQ Catholics and their families.
This was a journey more than a decade in the making, both for the church and for me as a gay Catholic.
About a year before Pope Francis was elected, I wrote an essay for America about the high number of Catholics leaving the church. Today I publicly identify as gay and Catholic, but back then, especially in my writing, I was fairly closeted. In that particular essay I expressed empathy with other Catholics whose own lives did not fit neatly into the ideals held up by the church, including women, skeptics and people in same-sex relationships.
I did not explicitly state that my own struggles with the church were similar to other LGBTQ people: not feeling fully welcome in parishes, hurt by bigoted comments from church leaders and fearful that employment at Catholic institutions was untenable. I explained that I was envious of how some LGBTQ Catholics simply walked away; I was stuck in a morass of my own making. I loved the church too much to leave, but as I slowly grew more comfortable with my own sexual orientation, I didn’t feel I had a spiritual home within it.
That started to change when Francis was elected pope.
Beginning perhaps with his now famous response to a question from a journalist about gay men in the priesthood (“Who am I to judge?”) I sensed that Francis was opening the door for me and others like me to imagine life in the church without compromising key parts of our lives.
More examples followed.
Francis urged parents of LGBTQ children not to abandon their children. He criticized Catholics who were too focused on sexual morality. He embraced transgender people. Later, Francis said that LGBTQ people have a right to pastoral care and he even opened up the possibility of priests blessing same-sex couples. He sent several notes of encouragement to us at Outreach.
For me, Pope Francis created room to share my story honestly with my fellow believers and the wider world, a papal permission I did not imagine before his election.
Last year, I gave an interview to Boston Spirit, an LGBTQ magazine, about my efforts to make the church a more welcoming place. I spoke honestly about some of my struggles, but I also noted the progress I felt the church had made. In particular, I talked about the inspiration I feel looking at the ways that some younger LGBTQ people feel more comfortable remaining in the church today.
These two articles—my despondently opaque essay and the profile featuring my work in the church—bookend my experience of the Francis papacy. I don’t believe this is a coincidence. Francis helped me, and countless others, fully embrace our dual identities as LGBTQ Catholics.
Francis did little during his decade-long reign to change the church in terms of legal pronouncements or theological innovations. There are various reasons for this, not least of which is the fact that he sought to avoid schism and unify an increasingly fragile global communion. It is not unlikely that, as an elderly Argentine priest, he believed what the church teaches about sexuality. But that apparently did not prevent him from moving the church to act with mercy toward LGBTQ people.
Two instances of Francis helping me to imagine life in the church remain vivid in my mind.
The first arrived in 2015, when I was in Rome reporting on the Synod on the Family, a global meeting of bishops convened by Francis. The bishops were considering a range of once-taboo topics, including communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, and the role of gay people in the life of the church. Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago and a key U.S. interpreter of Francis, told me and a group of other reporters that Francis was finally treating Catholics like adults. There would be disagreements, as there always are when adults consider difficult topics, but Francis trusted Catholics to come to their own conclusions about how to live out church teaching in their own contexts.
The second came a few years later. I had just finished interviewing dozens of other LGBTQ Catholics for my book, Hidden Mercy, about the Catholic Church’s response to the H.I.V. and AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s. During the conversations, I talked about coming out to friends and family, meeting my husband at church and how reporting on LGBTQ Catholic issues had helped me process questions about my own faith. They told me how different it was to come out in the 1970s, how they had held out hope for the church to become more welcoming and about the pain they felt during the Vatican’s notorious crackdown on homosexuality in the 1980s. Learning how other LGBTQ people had acted so courageously, so Christian, during that harrowing time gave me hope.
When I wrote to Pope Francis to introduce him to some of these heroic priests, sisters and LGBTQ Catholics I had met, he wrote back to me. Instead of shying away from what remains a taboo topic, Francis shined a light on a community that has historically felt made to live in the shadows of the church. That ensured that others would benefit from these stories as well.
Pope Francis has passed, and the future is uncertain. It is possible that cardinals will elect someone who more or less shares his vision for the church and his devotion to mercy, but it’s also possible that they will want to emphasize something else.
Uncertainty is unnerving, but it’s a reality.
As we pray and celebrate our nephew’s baptism, I’ll include in my intentions Pope Francis. By treating LGBTQ Catholics as full members of the church, by creating space for us to tell our stories, Francis ensured that many more chapters will be written, the only limit is our own commitment to radically live out the Gospel
