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Francis becomes 1st pope to endorse same-sex civil unions

FILE - In this Saturday, Oct. 26, 2013 file photo, Pope Francis leaves after an audience with families in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. The Vatican is taking the unusual step of conducting a worldwide survey on how parishes deal with sensitive issues such as birth control, divorce and gay marriage, seeking input ahead of a major meeting on the family that Pope Francis plans next year. The survey reflects the pope's pledges to move away from what he called a "Vatican-centric" approach toward one where local church leaders are more involved in decision-making. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File)

ROME
(AP) — Pope Francis became the first pontiff to endorse same-sex civil
unions in comments for a documentary that premiered Wednesday, sparking
cheers from gay Catholics and demands for clarification from
conservatives, given the Vatican’s official teaching on the issue.

The
papal thumbs-up came midway through the feature-length documentary
“Francesco,” which premiered at the Rome Film Festival. The film, which
features fresh interviews with the pope, delves into issues Francis
cares about most, including the environment, poverty, migration, racial
and income inequality, and the people most affected by discrimination.

“Homosexual
people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God,”
Francis said in one of his sit-down interviews for the film. “You can’t
kick someone out of a family, nor make their life miserable for this.
What we have to have is a civil union law; that way they are legally
covered.”

While serving as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis
endorsed civil unions for gay couples as an alternative to same-sex
marriages. However, he had never come out publicly in favor of civil
unions as pope, and no pontiff before him had, either.

The Jesuit
priest who has been at the forefront in seeking to build bridges with
gays in the church, the Rev. James Martin, praised the pope’s comments
as “a major step forward in the church’s support for LGBT people.”

“The
pope’s speaking positively about civil unions also sends a strong
message to places where the church has opposed such laws,” Martin said
in a statement.

However, the conservative bishop of Providence,
Rhode Island, Thomas Tobin, immediately called for clarification. “The
pope’s statement clearly contradicts what has been the long-standing
teaching of the church about same-sex unions,” Tobin said in a
statement. “The church cannot support the acceptance of objectively
immoral relationships.”

Catholic teaching holds that gays must be
treated with dignity and respect but that homosexual acts are
“intrinsically disordered.” A 2003 document from the Vatican’s doctrine
office stated that the church’s respect for gays “cannot lead in any way
to approval of homosexual behavior or to legal recognition of
homosexual unions.”

Doing so, the Vatican reasoned, would not
only condone “deviant behavior,” but create an equivalence to marriage,
which the church holds is an indissoluble union between man and woman.

That
document was signed by the then-prefect of the office, Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI and Francis’ predecessor.

Director
Evgeny Afineevsky, who is gay, expressed surprise after the premiere
Wednesday that the pope’s comments on civil unions had created such a
firestorm, saying Francis wasn’t trying to change doctrine but was
merely expressing his belief that gays should enjoy the same rights as
heterosexuals.

“The world needs positivity right now, the world
needs to care about climate change, care about refugees and migration,
borders, walls, family separation,” Afineevsky said, urging attention be
paid to the main issues covered by the film.

One of the main
characters in the documentary is Juan Carlos Cruz, the Chilean survivor
of clergy sexual abuse whom Francis initially discredited during a 2018
visit to Chile.

Cruz, who is gay, said that during his first
meetings with the pope in May 2018 after they patched things up, Francis
assured him that God made Cruz gay. Cruz tells his own story in
snippets throughout the film, chronicling both Francis’ evolution on
understanding sexual abuse as well as to document the pope’s views on
gay people.

Afineevsky had remarkable access to cardinals, the
Vatican television archives and the pope himself. He said he negotiated
his way in through persistence, and deliveries of Argentine mate tea and
Alfajores cookies that he got to the pope via some well-connected
Argentines in Rome.

“Listen, when you are in the Vatican, the only
way to achieve something is to break the rule and then to say, ‘I’m
sorry,’” Afineevsky said in an interview ahead of the premiere.

The
director worked official and unofficial channels starting in early
2018, and ended up so close to Francis by the end of the project that he
showed the pope the movie on his iPad in August. The two recently
exchanged Yom Kippur greetings; Afineevsky is a Russian-born,
Israeli-raised Jew now based in Los Angeles. On Wednesday, Afineevsky’s
48th birthday, the director said Francis presented him with a birthday
cake during a private meeting at the Vatican.

But “Francesco” is more than a biopic about the pope.

Wim
Wenders did that in the 2018 film “Pope Francis: A Man of His Word,”
which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. “Francesco,” is more a
visual survey of the world’s crises and tragedies, with audio from the
pope providing possible ways to solve them.

Afineevsky, who was
nominated for an Oscar for his 2015 documentary “Winter on Fire:
Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom,” traveled the world to film his pope movie:
The settings include Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh where Myanmar’s
Rohingya sought refuge; the U.S.-Mexico border; and Francis’ native
Argentina.

“The film tells the story of the pope by reversing the
cameras,” said Vatican communications director Paolo Ruffini, who was
one of Afineevsky’s closest Vatican-based collaborators on the film.

Ruffini
said that when Afineevsky first approached him about a documentary, he
tried to tamp down his hopes for interviewing the pope. “I told him it
wasn’t going to be easy,” he said.

But Ruffini gave him some
advice: names of people who had been impacted by the pope, even after
just a brief meeting. Afineevsky found them: the refugees Francis met
with on some of his foreign trips, prisoners he blessed, and some of the
gays to whom he has ministered.

“I told him that many of those
encounters had certainly been filmed by the Vatican cameras, and that
there he would find a veritable gold mine of stories that told a story,”
Ruffini said. “He would be able to tell story of the pope through the
eyes of all and not just his own.”

Francis’ outreach to gays dates
to his first foreign trip in 2013, when he uttered the now-famous words
“Who am I to judge,” when asked during an airborne news conference
returning home from Rio de Janiero about a purportedly gay priest.

Since
then, he has ministered to gays and transsexual prostitutes, and
welcomed people in gay partnerships into his inner circle. One of them
was his former student, Yayo Grassi, who along with his partner visited
Francis at the Vatican’s Washington D.C. embassy during the pope’s 2015
visit to the U.S.

The Vatican publicized that encounter, making
video and photos of it available, after Francis was ambushed during that
same visit by his then-ambassador, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who
invited the anti-gay marriage activist Kim Davis to meet with the pope.

News
of the Davis audience made headlines at the time and was viewed by
conservatives as a papal stamp of approval for Davis, who was jailed for
refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses. The Vatican, however,
vigorously sought to downplay it, with the Vatican spokesman saying the
meeting by no means indicated Francis’ support for her or her position
on gay marriage.

However, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario
Bergoglio was fervently opposed to gay marriage when he was archbishop
of Buenos Aires. Then, he launched what gay activists remember as a “war
of God” against Argentina’s move to approve same-sex marriage.

The
pope’s authorized biographer, Sergio Rubin, said at the time of his
2013 election that Bergoglio was politically wise enough to know the
church couldn’t win a straight-on fight against gay marriage. Instead,
Rubin said, Bergoglio urged his fellow bishops to lobby for gay civil
unions instead.

It wasn’t until Bergoglio’s proposal was shot
down by the conservative bishops’ conference that Bergoglio publicly
declared his opposition, and the church lost the issue altogether.

Francis,
in the new documentary, essentially confirms Rubin’s account of what
transpired. Of his belief in the need for legislation to protect gays
living in civil relationships, he said: “I stood up for that.”

Afineevsky
declined to say when Francis made the comment, but he began production
in 2018 and Italy locked down for the coronavirus in March, suggesting
the interview would have occurred in 2018 or more likely 2019.

Francis
DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, an organization of
LGBT Catholics, praised Francis’ comments as a “historic” shift for a
church that has a record of persecuting gays.

“At the same time,
we urge Pope Francis to apply the same kind of reasoning to recognize
and bless these same unions of love and support within the Catholic
Church, too,” he said in a statement.

However, more conservative
commentators sought to play down Francis’ words and said that while
secular civil unions are one thing, a church blessing of them is quite
another.

In a tweet, conservative U.S. author and commentator Ryan
Anderson noted that he and some of his colleagues had gone on record a
decade ago saying they would support federal civil unions for any two
adults who commit to sharing domestic responsibilities. Such an
arrangement, Anderson said, would leave churches the option of refusing
to recognize these unions as marriage.