A week away from the conclave that will determine who succeeds Pope Francis as next leader of the Catholic Church, LGBTQ+ rights are proving central to a lobbying campaign already underway among the cardinals who will vote for him.
Some of the candidates are predicted to build on Francis’ more progressive agenda, while others represent a return to a more conservative worldview.
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Pope Francis leaves behind a complicated legacy for LGBTQ+ Catholics
“Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God,” he said, while also calling trans identity an “ideological project.”
In his time as pontiff, Francis met with trans women, condoned the blessing of same-sex couples, and urged parents of LGBTQ+ people to “accompany their children and not hide in an attitude of condemnation.”
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“If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?” Francis told reporters.
Sticking to church doctrine, Francis, who died at 88 on April 21, did not express support for marriage equality.
While Francis appointed 80% of the college of cardinals who will vote for his successor, his inclusive message was stridently opposed by many of the group’s more conservative members.
On the one hand, homosexual relations are considered sinful, but on the other, a significant percentage — probably the majority — of cardinals are homosexual.
Rik Torfs, a professor of canon law at the Catholic University in Belgium
Homosexuality is an “abomination,” declared one cardinal considered a possible successor to Francis, Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, the archbishop of Kinshasa in Congo, Africa.
Following the pope’s decision to allow same-sex couple blessings, Ambongo said, “Within the church family of God in Africa, this declaration has caused a shockwave, it has sown misconceptions and unrest in the minds of many lay faithful, consecrated persons, and even pastors and has aroused strong reactions.”
“Unions of persons of the same sex,” he said, “are seen as contradictory to cultural norms and intrinsically corrupt,” Ambongo added. Francis appointed him a cardinal in 2019.
His views were also championed by anti-LGBTQ+ Catholic League President Bill Donohue after the pope’s death, when he urged cardinals to consider an African successor to Francis.
“If the cardinals decide to choose someone who is a traditionalist, they can do no better than to look to Africa. It is home to the most brilliant orthodox clergy in the world,” said Donohue.
Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah is another African traditionlist being pushed by anti-LGBTQ+ Catholics.
“I think that the first victims of the LGBT ideology are the persons who experience a homosexual orientation,” Sarah wrote in his book The Day Is Now Far Spent, an examination of the “spiritual, moral, and political collapse of the Western world.”
“They are led by its militants to reduce their whole identity to their sexual behavior,” Sarah wrote. “I beg Catholics who are tempted by homosexuality not to let themselves be shut away in this prison of LGBT ideology.”
German cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, an outspoken critic of Francis’ progressive views on LGBTQ+ people, said the next pontiff should be “strong on doctrine” and “determined to stand up to ideological lobbies, including the gay lobby.”
Müller called for a return to “orthodoxy, doctrine founded on scripture and apostolic tradition, and against heresy.”
“The homosexual lobby wants to equate marriage with unions between people of the same sex, but this totally contradicts the doctrine of the Bible,” Müller claimed, adding that “gender ideology” is a weapon deployed “against the doctrine of the Church.”
In 2017, Francis declined to extend Müller’s term as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Conservatives are also pushing for Cardinal Peter Erdo of Hungary, who has been silently complicit in the wake of repressive laws aimed at LGBTQ+ people by Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán. Orbán has launched public campaigns to erode LGBTQ+ rights and villainize migrants and refugees.
The search for a new pope whom conservatives hope will abandon Francis’ more inclusive approach to LGBTQ+ identity is complicated by one inconvenient truth, says Rik Torfs, a professor of canon law at the Catholic University in Belgium.
“A paradoxical situation remains,” Torfs said of Francis’s legacy. “On the one hand, homosexual relations are considered sinful, but on the other, a significant percentage — probably the majority — of cardinals are homosexual.”
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