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reThe Vatican has made it clear that Pope Francis’ recently released statements about same-sex couples changed nothing in the Catholic Church’s negative attitude toward homosexuality. It is “obvious that the Pope was referring to certain state regulations, but certainly not to the doctrine of the Church, which he has affirmed many times in recent years,” says a letter that the Secretary of State apparently sent to the Apostolic Nuncio. to send it to all the Conferences of Catholic Bishops around the world.
At the same time, the Vatican points out that these are statements from a previous interview that are taken out of context. The text of the letter was posted on Twitter by the Apostolic Nuncio in Mexico, Archbishop Franco Coppola.
2019 statements
In a documentary by Russian director Yevgeny Afineevsky, which was screened two weeks ago at a film festival in Rome, Francis says: “Homosexuals have the right to live with a family.” They are also children of God, they must not be “cast out.” Then follows the phrase: “What we need is a law that enables a civil society. For that I campaigned “.
It was the first time that a Pope advocated for the recognition of civil law for same-sex couples. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had expressly rejected such recognition in 2003 under its then Prefect, Jospeh Cardinal Ratzinger. According to Catholic teaching, homosexual acts “must not be approved” because they violate divine law. However, homosexuals should not be discriminated against.
The Vatican has now informed the bishops that these are two statements from a previous interview with the Pope that he conducted in 2019 with the Mexican television network Televisa. The two sentences originally come from different contexts, but were merged into a single answer in the documentary. That caused confusion.
What family do you mean?
According to the Vatican, the ruling on the right to a family refers in its original context to the fact that homosexuals should not be discriminated against by their family. In this sense, Francisco had expressed himself in 2016 in his letter “Amoris laetitia”. The sentence on legal recognition was, therefore, in another part of the interview, in which it was about the rejection of a law on the equality of homosexual couples with marriage in Argentina in 2010. The current Pope and then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, had rejected this law at that time.
In the interview, Francis said it was “incompatible” to talk about a same-sex marriage. Then, according to the Vatican, the sentence on the legal recognition of same-sex couples that appears in the documentary was mentioned. The Catholic News Service, the news agency of the American Bishops’ Conference, which received the original version of the 2019 interview, had previously presented a consistent reconstruction.
Censored by the Vatican
The Vatican leaves open the question of why the papal statement on homosexual couples was not included in the version of the interview with the Mexican television network published in 2019. The Mexican station had announced that the final version of the interview came from from the Vatican. Apparently, the Vatican had censored this statement. It also remains to be seen whether the Vatican knowingly approved the pope’s statement or whether it did not know it was contained in the material the Russian director had seen in the Vatican. The Vatican only affirms that the indications for an “adequate understanding” of the Pope’s words were given at the express request of Francis.
