The Pope's Half Turn toward LGBTQ Folks
Leo XIV pivots toward justice. Mine isn’t included.
Updated May 20, 2026. New sources surfaced after first publication prompted three additions: a reckoning with Francis’s record on the Synodal Way and the seminary remarks, a closer reading of what “freedom of men and women” actually means in Vatican vocabulary, and the silence on decriminalization during the April flight back from Africa.
OnMay 9, 2026, the Associated Press filed a piece out of Vatican City under Nicole Winfield’s byline. The lead was that the Vatican was sending new signals of openness to LGBTQ Catholics, with limitations attached. A working group inside the Synod on Synodality had released testimony from two gay married Catholics on the harm Church teaching had done them. Pope Leo XIV had told reporters on the flight back from Africa that the unity or division of the Church should not revolve around sexual matters. Cardinal Parolin had called talk of sanctions against German priests using same-sex blessing guidelines premature.
In the same news cycle, a letter from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith went public. Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández wrote it on November 18, 2024 to Bishop Stephan Ackermann of Trier. The Vatican released it May 4, 2026. The letter told the German bishops that any blessing format that “could offer a form of moral legitimization to a union that presumes to be a marriage or to an extra-marital sexual practice” was outside the bounds of Fiducia Supplicans. Bishop Joseph Strickland called the synod working-group report deeply alarming (Winfield, 2026; White, 2026).
That’s the shape of the pontificate in a single news day. Door cracked. Door braced against further movement.
I read the piece on a Saturday morning in Sioux Falls, between coffee and a twelve-hour writing binge. I’m a queer trans woman. I’m also a skeptical Lutheran who stays in the pew. The Catholic Church has never been my Church. The Pope isn’t my Pope. But the Vatican has a voice that travels, and what it does and refuses to do shapes the political weather under which my doctor practices medicine and my passport carries a sex marker the government chose for me. So when Leo XIV says justice should come before sexual morality in the Church’s witness, I pay attention. And I notice what’s missing from the sentence.
This is the second version of this essay. The first one published last week. Readers and an editor I trust pushed back on several points. The pushback was right. The piece is sharper now.
What Leo Has Actually Said
Let me be fair to him first. Leo XIV’s pivot is real.
On April 23, 2026, on the flight back from his first papal visit to Africa, he answered a reporter’s question about the German bishops with this:
“First of all, I think it’s very important to understand that the unity or division of the Church should not revolve around sexual matters. We tend to think that when the Church is talking about morality, the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that need to be addressed.” (Vatican News, 2026)
I want to hold that sentence a moment. A pope, on a working press flight, saying the things the Catholic Right has used as litmus tests for forty years aren’t the things the Church should split over.
It’s not the only signal. On October 9, 2025, Leo released his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te, a document on the Church’s love for the poor, which he completed from a draft Francis was working on at the time of his death. The text names “the dictatorship of an economy that kills” and “structures of sin.” Section 16 says that God “has a special place in his heart for those who are discriminated against and oppressed, and he asks us, his Church, to make a decisive and radical choice in favor of the weakest” (Leo XIV, 2025). Cardinal Czerny, presenting the document on its release, said it had been incorporated into the papal magisterium. That’s not boilerplate. That’s the magisterial weight of two pontificates resting on the option for the poor.
Leo has also been costly in terms of migration. He met Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso the day before Dilexi te dropped and told him the Church couldn’t be silent on the U.S. administration’s deportation campaign (Picheta & Mortensen, 2025). His Christmas 2025 Urbi et Orbi named Gaza, Yemen, Ukraine, Sudan, Lebanon, and the people crossing the Mediterranean and the borders of the Americas (NPR, 2025). He announced a plan to make Vatican City the first carbon-neutral state in the world (National Catholic Reporter, 2025). On the same Africa flight, he condemned the death penalty in plain terms.
All of this is real. None of it is performance. The pope chose the name Leo to invoke Leo XIII and Rerum novarum, the 1891 encyclical that put workers’ dignity at the center of Catholic social teaching, and he’s done the work to make that name mean something on his watch.
About the Francis Comparison
The first version of this essay used Francis’s todos, todos, todos, “all are welcome,” as the universalist baseline Leo XIV was now narrowing. That framing was too generous to Francis. Here are the receipts I should have engaged with the first time.
On October 23, 2023, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, sent a letter to Dr. Beate Gilles, general secretary of the German Bishops’ Conference, telling the German Synodal Way that the Church’s teaching on women’s ordination and homosexual acts was non-negotiable and warning of “disciplinary consequences,” including potential excommunication, for any local move to ordain women. Die Welt published the letter in full on November 21, 2023 (Wimmer, 2023). On November 10, 2023, Pope Francis personally wrote to four German laywomen that he shared their concern that the German laypeople and clergy organizing for reform were drifting “further and further away” from the universal Church.
On February 16, 2024, Parolin, Fernández, and Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, then prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, co-signed a letter telling the DBK that their planned vote on Synodal Council statutes would be “in contradiction to the instructions of the Holy See” (L’Osservatore Romano, 2024). That third signature matters. The man now sitting in Peter’s chair personally co-signed the Vatican letter that halted the German Synodal Council’s reform vote.
On March 14, 2024, Francis announced that ten study groups would handle the most contested questions raised at the October 2023 Synod on Synodality, including LGBTQ pastoral questions and Fiducia Supplicans implementation, which were routed into Study Group 9, on “Theological criteria and synodal methodologies for shared discernment of emerging doctrinal, pastoral, and ethical issues,” chaired by Cardinal Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio of Lima. The deadline for the groups’ reports was June 2025. Leo XIV extended it to December 31, 2025. The interim reports went up November 17, 2025. Study Group 9’s final report, the one that included testimony from the two gay married Catholics that broke this news cycle, came out May 5, 2026 (O’Connell, 2024; Vatican News, 2025). The reforms didn’t get a vote on the synod floor. They got a study group reporting back to the pope personally.
On May 20, 2024, Francis told the Italian Episcopal Conference in a closed meeting that gay men should not be admitted to seminaries because there was “già troppa frociaggine,” already too much faggotry, in Italian formation houses. La Repubblica broke the story May 27. The Holy See Press Office apologized May 28 for the language, not for the policy on gay seminarian admissions (Catholic News Agency, 2024). On June 11, 2024, in a closed meeting with about 160 Rome diocesan priests at the Pontifical Salesian University, Francis used the same word a second time, this time framed as something a bishop had reportedly said to him (Brockhaus, 2024).
So Francis said the words about welcome and used the office to enforce their opposite. The universalism was rhetorical. The doctrine wasn’t moving. The German laypeople and clergy who tried to act on todos, todos, todos were told the welcome didn’t extend to the part where the Church changes anything. The men training for the priesthood who would have to lie about being gay to qualify learned what the Pope thought of them from the leaked closed-door transcript.
What this changes about the rest of the essay: Leo XIV isn’t narrowing a sincerely universalist Francis. Leo XIV is the public-record successor to a Francis whose welcome language and doctrinal practice were already in tension. The Leo argument, that what he says in public is what he can be held to in public and the silence on criminalization is what it is, holds. The contrast with Francis was too generous to him. Leo at least tells you out loud the doctrine isn’t moving. That isn’t progress. It’s a different shape of dishonesty, and the piece should have said so.
What the Catalog Doesn’t Include
Now read the April 23 sentence again.
“There are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion.”
Justice. Equality. Freedom of men and women. Freedom of religion.
Each of those is a Vatican category with its own theological infrastructure. The phrase “freedom of men and women” is not gender-neutral equality language. It is complementarity language, the Vatican’s doctrinal vocabulary for talking about the dignity of human persons inside the man-woman binary that the magisterium treats as theologically foundational. Dignitas Infinita, the April 8, 2024 declaration from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on human dignity, says explicitly that “all attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual differences between man and woman are to be rejected” (Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, 2024, §60). The document affirms gender-difference as a permanent feature of human dignity in the same passage where it groups “gender theory” with abortion, surrogacy, war, and trafficking as offenses against dignity.
The feminist Catholic theologian Mary E. Hunt, writing in Religion Dispatches the week Dignitas Infinita came out, called the document “an intellectually embarrassing and harmful mess” for exactly this reason. It makes a theology of human dignity that depends on enforcing the binary it claims is “ineliminable” (Hunt, 2024). The National Catholic Reporter commentary the same week concluded that “this ideological commitment to gender complementarity renders the document incoherent” (National Catholic Reporter, 2024).
When Leo XIV says “freedom of men and women,” he is speaking the lexicon his predecessor’s DDF used to frame gender-affirming care as a category error. Queer equality isn’t omitted from his catalog by accident. The catalog is constructed not to have a slot for it. The perimeter isn’t drawn elsewhere, in Dignitas Infinita or in the Diario Correo interview or in the Allen biography. The perimeter is drawn in the same sentence that announces the pivot.
That sharpens the half-a-turn read. Leo isn’t moving in the direction of trans equality and then stopping at a fence. He is announcing a justice agenda whose categories were already constructed to keep us outside.
What He Has Said in the Same Breath
The April 23 press conference where Leo said justice should take priority over sexual matters also contained this:
“First of all, the Holy See has made it clear to the German bishops that we do not agree with the formalized blessing of couples, in this case, homosexual couples.” (Vatican News, 2026)
He invoked Francis’s todos, todos, todos, all are welcome, and then attached the qualifier: “all called to conversion.” To go further than the brief, informal blessings sketched in Fiducia Supplicans, he said, “the topic can cause more disunity than unity” (Roewe, 2026).
In February 2026, in an interview with Elise Allen excerpted in La Repubblica, he was even clearer: “It seems to me very unlikely, at least in the near future, that the doctrine of the Church will change its teachings on sexuality and marriage.” Asked about recognition of gay marriage or recognition of trans people, he said: “Individuals will be welcomed and received… not as an expression or non-expression of a specific identity… I believe that we must first change attitudes, before even thinking about changing what the Church teaches on a particular issue” (Euronews, 2026).
On December 4, 2016, as Bishop of Chiclayo and a public spokesman for the Peruvian Episcopal Conference during the national fight over the gender-inclusive school curriculum, Robert Prevost told Diario Correo (Fernández, 2016, translated from Spanish):
“Promoting gender ideology is already a confusion, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist, since God has created man and woman. Attempting to confuse the natural ideas will only do harm to families and people.”
“There are men and women. We must respect the dignity of every person, including the choices adults may make. Telling a child who hasn’t yet reached sufficient development to choose with regard to identity and sexual orientation is going to create much confusion.”
“That campaign, apparently, is going to create much confusion and is going to do much damage. We must not confuse the importance of family and marriage with what others want to create as if it were a right to do something that isn’t.”
He has never publicly retracted any of it.
And the institution he leads still operates under Dignitas Infinita. Leo hasn’t retracted that document either. Nobody’s expecting him to.
So the pivot is bounded, both by the catalog Leo used to announce it and by the doctrinal record he has not moved. Justice over sexual morality, yes. But “justice” defined in a frame that calls my existence an “ideology” that “seeks to create genders that don’t exist.”
That’s half a turn.
