By Joshua McElwee
VATICAN CITY, April 27 (Reuters) – Pope Leo’s four-nation tour of Africa has also grabbed headlines with the pontiff’s firm condemnation of autocracy and war and unprecedented attacks by U.S. President Donald Trump.
But the small moment, in which the pope said the Catholic Church should prioritize questions of inequality and justice over sexual morality, could prove to have long-term significance for the church’s 1.4 billion members, experts said.
“The unity or division of the Church should not revolve around sexual matters,” Leo, the first US Pope, said at a news conference on his flight home on Thursday.
“I believe there are many bigger and more important issues like justice, equality…all of which will take precedence over that particular issue,” he said.
Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of Dignity USA, a group that supports LGBTQ Catholics, called the pope’s comments “a very important and overdue realignment of priorities.”
Priests and bishops of the worldwide church have long emphasized its teachings on sexual issues as a top priority, including bans on abortion, birth control and same-sex marriage.
On his first trip to Africa in 2009, the late Pope Benedict XVI sparked an international outcry when he said the church could not lift the ban on Catholics using condoms, even to help fight the transmission of HIV/AIDS.
Benedict said allowing condoms would morally “exacerbate the problem.”
The Pope’s vision for the world church appeared new
Leo made his comments Thursday in response to a question about the church blessing same-sex couples.
He said he supported the late Pope Francis’ landmark 2023 decision to allow pastors to bless same-sex couples informally, outside of ritual services, and on a case-by-case basis.
But Leo said he wanted to prioritize other ethical questions and didn’t want to make the blessing more formal.
“Going beyond that today, I think this topic can cause more division than unity,” the 70-year-old pontiff said.
Boston College Academic Rev. James Cannon called Leo’s approach new for the universal church.
The pope “is saying that the perception that there is a hierarchy of concerns in the Vatican and that issues of sexuality have a single priority of place is not the case,” said Canon, a Jesuit priest who founded a global network of Catholic academics focused on ethical issues.
“This is clearly a prudent decision by the pontiff … that the issues of blessing same-sex marriage should not eclipse the immediate challenges of dictatorship and war,” Keenan said.
The Catholic Church teaches that sex outside of heterosexual marriage is a sin. It states that people with same-sex attraction should strive to be chaste.
Leo’s ‘who am I to judge’ moment
Francis, who led the church for 12 years until his death last April, also sought to emphasize church teaching on issues of justice.
Asked in 2013 about rumors that a priest working at the Vatican was gay, Francis famously replied: “If a person is gay and is seeking the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge them?”
Those comments, signaling an unprecedented openness from the pope toward LGBTQ Catholics, became a defining moment of Francis’ tenure, widely quoted and printed on merchandise and T-shirts.
“It’s Leo’s ‘Who am I to judge?’ as it seems moment,” said David Gibson, a Vatican expert and Fordham University academic, about Leo’s comments Thursday.
“(Leo) is about peace and justice and sees those moral teachings as important as sexual morality,” Gibson said.
Frances DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministries, another group that supports LGBTQ Catholics, praised Leo’s response.
“He listed other matters, more social matters — justice, equality, freedom — as the bigger moral concerns,” DeBernardo said. “For years, Catholic advocates for LGBTQ+ people have been saying the same thing.”
(Reporting by Joshua McElwee Editing by Gareth Jones)
