Pope Francis backs civil unions in a documentary film but does not speak of marriage

I see that many media outlets have run headlines along the lines of "Pope recognises gay marriage" or "Pope calls for legalisation of gay marriage". Let us clarify at once. First, today's statement is of a quite different nature, as I wrote earlier; second, it was made in a rather unusual form for the Vatican, namely as an answer to a question in an interview recorded for a documentary film. Yes, this came as a surprise to everyone. But any such statement, to become official or to represent the position of the Church or of its head, that is, to acquire real political weight, would have had to appear in the form of a papal document known as an encyclical. I have not yet seen any official comments from the Vatican. As for the film, the film simply sets out the Pope's views on various questions of life, situations and social problems.

What does the film by Evgeny Afineevsky actually show us? The story of an Italian gay man, Andrea Rubera, who attended one of the papal Masses at Santa Marta and handed the Pope a note with an account of himself and a question: should he and his partner bring their children to a church where they might be condemned as the children of a homosexual couple? We learn that Francis read this note and telephoned Rubera, urging him in conversation to bring his children to church and not to hide the whole truth from the priest. It was in this connection that Francis made his statement in support of civil unions.

So. What precisely did Pope Francis speak in favour of? He spoke for the rights of civil unions contracted between people of any sex. He used the words civil union and family; marriage was not mentioned.

Until now the Church's position on same-sex marriage had been unambiguously negative. Benedict XVI repeatedly stressed the impossibility and unacceptability of marriages between people of the same sex, insisting that only the fruit of love between a man and a woman may be called marriage, and describing other types of union as fragile and weak. True, the Vatican of Benedict's era also declared that any attempt to introduce into legislation the notion of rights for couples not married at all was impermissible, to say nothing of same-sex couples. This also influenced the conservative attitudes of Italian politics, for example the ban on naming same-sex parents in their children's documents.

Same-sex unions themselves were legalised in Italy, with the status of civil unions, only in 2016, and even then they did not receive the full range of rights enjoyed by heterosexual unions, in particular those concerning the protection of children.

That is to say, today's news amounts to this: the Pope has merely turned his gaze towards norms already adopted in many countries of the world and, in part, in Italy. Never before had any of the Popes spoken about civil rights for same-sex couples. This is indeed a great breakthrough, but so far only an ideological and a media one. Nevertheless, Francis's words today should in principle change the status quo, under which the attitude of the Catholic Church towards civil unions between people of the same sex was left to the discretion of national episcopates and was not centralised.

But we must not forget, and you can read about this in my earlier posts, that Francis, at least until now, was a defender of precisely traditional marriage and a supporter of the terminological separation of the concept of marriage from that of civil unions, to which the cohabitation of same-sex couples belongs.