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AN INFLUENTIAL PRIEST, who is a consultant to the Vatican’s communication division, has said Pope Francis did more during his papacy for the LGBTQ+ community than “any Pope in history”.
Father James Martin is Editor-at-Large of the Jesuit magazine ‘America’ and was appointed by Pope Francis as a consultant to the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications.
He is well known for his outreach work to the LGBTQ+ community from within the Church, including his book “Building a Bridge” in which he calls for Catholics to show more respect and compassion to the LGBTQ+ community.
Martin Scorsese acted as an executive producer for a documentary based on Fr Martin’s LGBTQ+ ministry, also called “Building a Bridge”.
In 2018 Fr Martin, who is half-Irish and has family in Castlebridge in Co Wexford, delivered a talk in Dublin at the World Meeting of Families festival in which he remarked that too many LGBTQ+ Catholics had been “deeply wounded” by the Church.
He has often received virulent abuse from some Catholics for his outreach work.
In an article for The Washington Post, he revealed the contents of a letter he received for offering support from within the Church to the LGBTQ+ community: “You’re leading souls to hell where you will surely reside in a few years.”
In that same article, he said such people “end up trying to be so Catholic that they are barely Christian”.
Speaking to The Journal on Francis’s legacy, Fr Martin remarked that “Pope Francis did more for LGBTQ+ people than any Pope in history”.
“Without a doubt. And every time we met, he stressed his desire for pastoral outreach to LGBTQ+ people – in every diocese and in every part of the Church.”
Early into his papacy, Francis said: “If a person is gay and seeks out the Lord and is willing, who am I to judge that person?”
This was in response to an Italian journalist who asked Francis what he would say to a gay person who was seeking the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
Later, Pope Francis called for the Church to apologise for the harm it has caused to the LGBTQ+ community, saying: “We Christians have to apologise for so many things, not just for this [treatment of gay people], but we must ask for forgiveness, not just apologise.”
And in recent years, Francis formally allowed priests to bless same-sex couples.
Some priests had already been doing for many years, but in December 2023, Pope Francis formally approved such blessings, saying God’s love and mercy should not be subject to “an exhaustive moral analysis” to receive it.
In his recently published memoir, Hope, Francis hit out at the “hypocrisy” surrounding his decision to formally allow priests to bless same-sex couples.
“It is strange that nobody worries about the blessing of an entrepreneur who exploits people, and this is a grave sin, or about someone who pollutes our common home, while there’s a public scandal if the pope blesses a divorced woman or a homosexual,” wrote Francis.
“Opposition to pastoral open-mindedness often uncovers these hypocrisies,” he added.
“Everyone in the Church is invited, including people who are divorced, including people who are homosexual, including people who are transgender,” writes Francis in his memoir.
He added: “The first time that a group of transgender people came to the Vatican, they left in tears, moved because I had taken their hands, had kissed them… As if I had done something exceptional for them. But they are daughters of God!”
To mark the 2023 World Day of the Poor, Francis welcomed a group of transgender women, with whom he has formed an ongoing relationship, to a luncheon at the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall.
“Among LGBTQ+ people, their families and friends, these initiatives were like a cup of water in a desert,” Fr Martin told The Journal.
“It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly he changed the conversation.”
While the Catholic Church is diminishing in the Western World, it is growing in Africa.
Some 32 African countries have anti-LGBTQ+ laws on their books.
“Homosexuality is not a crime, it is a human fact, and the Church and Christians cannot remain indifferent in the face of this criminal injustice, nor can they respond faint-heartedly,” writes Francis in his memoir.
Fr Martin remarked that one of the most important, though lesser known, initiatives of Francis’s was to publicly oppose the criminalisation of homosexuality.
Fr Martin noted that in an interview with Outreach.faith, an LGBTQ+ Catholic resource, Francis remarked that “bishops who continue to see this as a crime were ‘wrong’.”
“It was a very supportive message for LGBTQ+ people in places where they are under attack,” said Fr Martin.
In his memoir, Francis addressed members of the LGBTQ+ community who have “personal experience of ‘the refusal of the Church’”, and said “this was the refusal of one person in the Church, because the Church is a mother gathers together all of her children”.
He added that while “sexual sins tend to cause more of an outcry from some people, they are really not the most serious”.
“They are human sins, of the flesh,” said Francis.
Meanwhile, Fr Martin noted that Francis was the first pope ever to use the word “gay” in public.
Fr Martin noted that Francis appointed Juan Carlos Cruz, an openly gay Catholic and a Church abuse survivor, to a Papal Commission for the Protection of Minors.
“Pope Francis regularly met with people who minister with the LGBTQ+ community from around the world, myself included,” said Fr Martin.
“He sent yearly messages of support to our Outreach LGBTQ+ conferences, and for a long stretch of time he met monthly with transgender Catholics. These are all huge steps forward.”
Fr Martin further remarked that Pope Francis “changed to conversation almost entirely” with regards to the LGBT community “without changing Church teaching”.
“All of this stemmed from his heartfelt desire to meet people where they are, to listen and to learn.”
In October, Francis named 21 new cardinals in a bid to cement his mark on the group that will soon gather to elect his successor.
One of the people elected to the College of Cardinals by Francis was Father Timothy Radcliffe.
Radcliffe has often publicly challenged the Catholic Church’s teaching on LGBTQ+ issues and publicly raised the issue during the first phase of the Church’s historic Synod in 2023.
Fr Martin said the issues surrounding the LGBTQ+ communities were discussed – sometimes in a heated way – during the Synod and that “simply talking about those issues was a revolution”.
“It was probably the first time it was openly discussed at a worldwide Church meeting,” said Fr Martin.
When asked whether this recent election of cardinals will ensure that the next pope is broadly aligned to Francis’s thinking, Fr Martin said it’s “important to remember that while he has appointed most of the cardinals who will elect his successor, they are not carbon copies of Francis”.
And while Fr Martin said he doesn’t foresee a “dramatic swing in the opposite direction” during the papal conclave, he remarked: “But who knows? Only the Holy Spirit.”
Francis recently hit out against the “major crisis” of US President Donald Trump’s deportation plans and explicitly rejected Vice President JD Vance’s attempts to use Catholic theology to justify the administration’s crackdown on immigration.
When asked if there is concern among US Catholics of losing such a strong, global voice such as Francis during Trump’s second term, Fr Martin replied: “Whoever his successor is will continue to preach the Gospel. And that includes preaching Jesus’s call to welcome the ‘stranger’.”
In a statement to The Journal, Outhouse LGBTQ+ Centre said Francis’s papacy “marked a shift towards greater dialogue and openness, including steps towards the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people”.
Its CEO, Oisín O’Reilly, noted Francis’s famous “who am I to judge?” remark in 2013 and said it was a “tone of welcome yearned for by many in our community”.
“While deep injustices remain, his papacy offered glimpses of a more compassionate Church, one that, at times, under his leadership, seemed to recall its own call to mercy, justice, and the dignity of every person.”
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