Why I'll remember Pope Francis as my — imperfect — gay ally

San Francisco Chronicle​

24-04-2025

Three popes have died in my lifetime, but Pope Francis is the first I will mourn.
As a gay man who was raised Catholic (and has the therapy bills to prove it), it was Francis' response to one particularly pointed question in 2013 that floored me. On a flight back from his first official papal trip, he was asked about gay Catholic clergy members by journalists.
'We shouldn't marginalize people for this. They must be integrated into society,' Francis told reporters. 'If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?'
Those words immediately came to mind when I heard the news of Pope Francis' death on Monday, April 21, at age 88 from a stroke.
This might seem like a contradiction, but I was stunned to hear something so loving and Christ-like about gay people coming from the pope. Like many queers, my experience with Catholic leadership had not been positive. For all my love of the music, the art, the mysteries of the saints — plus my Italian American connection to Catholic traditions — when it came to spiritual succor, the message was that gay people like me were 'less than.'
It was a message I heard many times: at Mass when the prayers of the faithful asked 'that marriage be protected as between a man and a woman'; when I read about Catholic high schools banning same-sex couples from prom; and through stories of LGBTQ Catholics being denied communion.
For all the liberal, inclusive Catholics I'd known in real life — from Jesuits and nuns to laypeople — that same compassion and modernity was not reflected at the top. So when Francis asked, 'Who am I to judge?', it was a seismic shift.
Francis' predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, was a torchbearer of the Catholic homophobia I knew. In 2005, he said gay men should not be priests. In 2012, Benedict notoriously claimed that allowing marriage equality would threaten 'the future of humanity.' That same year, he also blessed Rebecca Kadaga, Speaker of the Ugandan Parliament and proponent of the country's 'Kill the Gays' Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
Before he was even pope in 1992, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Benedict authored an official Vatican declaration that called homosexuality an 'objective disorder' and a 'tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil.' The declaration said that Catholics must oppose LGBTQ equality and stated that homosexuality is a 'behavior to which no one has any conceivable right.'
Prior to Benedict, Pope John Paul II condemned same-sex marriage and in his final book, 2005's 'Memory and Identity,' expressed his opposition to marriage equality.
'It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil … which attempts to pit human rights against the family,' he wrote, in part.
Very loving, Holy Father.
I wasn't just baptized Catholic, Bravo family tradition meant nine years of parochial school. From kindergarten to the third grade, I had wonderful teachers who instilled in me a love of rituals like saying the rosary, a belief in service and a lifelong fascination with the outsiders and pariahs who went on to become saints and martyrs.
But after that, it wasn't Christ's love of the forsaken that defined my experience — it was watching how religion was used as a blunt instrument to persecute. I didn't understand how the church of my beloved Blessed Mother and Saint Bernadette could believe that women didn't deserve to be priests or that women shouldn't make their own decisions about their bodies and reproductive health.
Perhaps most definitively, I experienced how that top message of homophobia trickled down to the classroom. This was evident in various ways, whether it was my fellow altar servers calling me a fag (not a word Jesus used) for the way I tied my robe, or the teacher who told my health education class that AIDS was the consequence of the choices gay people made.
Admittedly, Pope Francis wasn't the perfect LGBTQ ally. In spite of his relative progressiveness, he said homosexuality was still a sin under Catholic doctrine, and notoriously referred to gay people by slurs on at least two occasions, for which he later apologized.
Francis invited transgender people, including transgender sex workers, to the Vatican in 2020 and in 2023, said that trans people can be baptized and become godparents. But he also opposed gender-affirming care for trans people.
Likewise, he allowed priests to bless same-sex couples but declared those blessings could not resemble wedding vows.
In his 12 years as pontiff, Francis showed he was willing to evolve on issues, regardless of the doctrine of papal infallibility. One of the most important ways I knew this pope was different was through his friendship with Juan Carlos Cruz, a gay man who he met as a survivor of clerical sexual abuse. In 2018, Francis told Cruz: 'God made you like this.'
I'm going to borrow an expression from the inclusive Presbyterians I hang out with now on Sundays by stating that I think Francis tried to be a 'Matthew 25' pope. That's the bible verse that states, 'Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'