In the weeks since Pope Francis passed away, there have been many conversations as to who would take up the next mantle, and what version of the Catholic church they would represent.
Before Francis had donned the mantle of the highest figure in the faith’s leadership, Roman Catholics had stayed the way of conservatism, last overseen by Pop Benedict XVI. Francis’s era, from 2013 to early 2025, strove to move away from that line of thinking by opening the church’s arms to those it had once shunned, including those in the LGBTQ+ community.
While not every action of the late figure was positive – he approved declarations against same-sex unions and gender affirming surgeries – many of his actions did push the church to view the world more progressively. Now the question is whether or not the newly elected Pope Leo XIV will follow in Francis’s footsteps and continue to move the church forward in a positive manner, or walk back to a less inclusive way of thinking.
While there is a limited amount of quotes that can be attributed to the previously named Cardinal Robert Prevost, there is some speculation as to how the new pope would move forward based on past remarks.
During the 2012 Synod of Bishops, Prevost had reportedly expressed contention with the challenges the Catholic Church was faced with, due to sympathetic media portrayals of “alternative families.”
“Note, for example, how alternative families comprised of homosexual partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed on television programs and in cinema,” he told a group of bishops at the time, according to the Catholic News Service. “The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that the mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully engrained in the viewing public that when people hear the Christian message, it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective.”
Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, which works to foster LGBTQ inclusion in the Catholic Church, has called the remarks “disappointing,” but notes there is a quiet optimism in his thoughts on the passing of the role.“We pray that in the 13 years that have passed, 12 of which were under the papacy of Pope Francis, that his heart and mind have developed more progressively on LGBTQ+ issues, and we will take a wait-and-see attitude to see if that has happened,” DeBernardo said in a statement.
Michael O’Loughlin, the executive director of Outreach, an LGBTQ Catholic organization, feels similarly to DeBernardo. Able to experience the announcement of the new pope first-hand in Rome, O’Loughlin remains hopeful that Leo will follow in the positive steps Francis made.
“I’m willing to look at his wider message, which was one of peace and standing up for the marginalized,” he said. “The fact that he switched to Spanish to address his former community in Peru I thought was a nice sign that he’s a man of the people.”
Jason Steidl Jack, a gay Catholic and an assistant teaching professor of religious studies at St. Joseph’s University, New York, presented a balanced reaction when it came to Pope Leo being announced to head the next era. “I do see him continuing Pope Francis’ legacy, especially of dialogue and synodality,” Steidl Jack said. However, the New York resident is also keeping in mind that yet again, Pope Francis wasn’t a perfect leader in the eyes of the LGBTQ community.
“The church’s teaching, even under Pope Francis, remains incredibly homophobic, and the church goes on inventing new ways of being transphobic as it really avoids learning about trans people and their experiences,” he said.
However, even for Steidl Jack, the passage of time does indicate some hope. “A lot of the world has changed since 2012. Even Pope Francis changed a great deal over the course of his pontificate,” he admitted. “So I hope that Pope Leo has been listening to LGBTQ Catholics. I hope he’s been paying attention and growing, just as Pope Francis did, just as the rest of the world has been.”
Greg Krajewski, a resident of Chicago, Pope Leo’s American home city, and also a practicing gay Catholic, expressed that he’s “careful [of] who I talk to and how I present myself,” but that many things said within the new pope’s opening speech painted an optimistic picture of who the man would be for all the church’s people.
“The first thing he said a couple of times, ‘God loves us without limits or conditions.’ I think this is a really big indication that even if he himself maybe has more reservations about the LGBTQ issues in the church, he is open to those discussions,” Krajewski remarked. “He is open to bringing us in.”
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