Joshua McElwee
VATICAN CITY, April 27 (Reuters) – Pope Leo’s four-nation tour of Africa saw the pontiff deliver a scathing condemnation of authoritarianism and war, as well as unprecedented attacks from U.S. President Donald Trump that grabbed headlines.
But experts say smaller moments in which the pope said the Catholic Church should prioritize issues of inequality and justice over issues of sexual morality may have more lasting importance to the church’s 1.4 billion members.
“The unity or division of the Church should not revolve around the issue of sexuality,” Leo, the first American pope, said at a news conference on Thursday’s flight home.
“I believe there are greater, more important issues like justice, equality…that are going to take precedence over that particular issue,” he said.
Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of Dignity USA, an organization that supports LGBTQ Catholics, called the pope’s comments “a very important and long overdue shift in priorities.”
The global Church’s priests and bishops have long emphasized the high priority of its teachings on sexual issues, including bans on abortion, birth control and same-sex marriage.
The late Pope Benedict XVI sparked an international outcry when he said during his first trip to Africa in 2009 that the church could not relax its ban on condom use by Catholics even to help combat the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Benedict said allowing condom use would only “exacerbate the problem” morally.
The pope’s move is seen as a new step for the global church
Leo made the comments Thursday in response to a question about the church’s blessings for same-sex couples.
He said he supported a landmark decision by the late Pope Francis in 2023 to allow priests to bless same-sex couples informally on a case-by-case basis outside of liturgical ceremonies.
But Leo said he wanted to prioritize other moral issues and did not want the blessing to be further formalized.
“Today, I think this topic could create more disunity than unity,” the 70-year-old pope said.
The Rev. James Keenan, a scholar at Boston College, called Leo’s approach new to the global church.
Keenan, a Jesuit priest who founded a global network of Catholic scholars focused on moral issues, said the pope “said there is a hierarchy of concerns at the Vatican, and the perception that sexual issues have a single priority is not true.”
Keenan said: “This is clearly a matter of papal prudence… The issue of blessing same-sex marriages should not overshadow the more pressing challenges of dictatorship and war.”
The Catholic Church teaches that sexual relations outside of heterosexual marriage are sinful. It says people with same-sex attractions should try to remain chaste.
Leo’s “who am I to judge” moment
Francis, who led the church for 12 years until his death last April, also largely sought to emphasize the church’s teaching on justice.
In 2013, when asked about rumors that priests working in the Vatican were gay, Francis famously responded: “If a person is gay and is seeking the Lord and has good intentions, who am I to judge them?”
The remarks marked the pope’s unprecedented openness to LGBTQ Catholics and became a seminal moment in Francis’ tenure, widely quoted and printed on merchandise and T-shirts.
“It seemed like Leo’s ‘Who am I to judge?'” Vatican expert David Gibson, a Fordham University scholar, said of Leo’s remarks Thursday.
“(Leo) is concerned with peace and justice and considers these moral teachings to be as important as sexual morality,” Gibson said.
Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, another organization that supports LGBTQ Catholics, praised Leo’s response.
“He listed other issues, more social issues — justice, equality, freedom — as moral issues that deserve more attention,” DeBernardo said. “Advocates for Catholic LGBTQ+ people have been saying the same thing for years.”
(Reporting by Joshua McElwee; Editing by Gareth Jones)
