Pope Leo, LGBTQ+ Catholics, and the Church We Long For, Part II
Gael Pardoen
Today’s post is the second part of a critique of Pope Leo XIV’s comments on LGBT issues during the recent interview with Elise Allen of Crux. You can read Part 1 by clicking here. Both parts were written by Dr. Gael Pardoen, PhD. Gael is a theologian and Fellow of St John’s College, Durham University, whose current research explores belonging and the witness of LGBTQ+ Catholics in the life of the Church.
In yesterday’s post, I explored Pope Leo’s remarks in four areas: their grounds for hope, the meaning of welcome, the framing of LGBTQ+ issues as polarising, and the price and cost of maintaining or achieving unity at the expense of truth and justice. Today, I continue that reflection by challenging the claim that recent attention to LGBTQ+ concerns in Western churches stems from an “obsession with sex,” arguing instead that these are not primarily questions of sex at all. I also question Pope Leo’s suggestion that today’s social crises arise from the decline of the traditional family model, and consider what it might truly mean to defend the family in our time. I conclude by offering some thoughts on what we might expect moving forward.
SEXUALITY, A WESTERN OBSESSION?
In the interview with Crux’s Elise Allen, the pope recalled that a bishop from the global south told him in relation to LGBTQ+ issues that “the West is obsessed with sexuality.” I would like to raise two caveats to this idea.
First, LGBTQ+ people in the global South do exist, and often remain invisible, silenced, and endangered. Their lives cannot be dismissed as “a Western issue.” Solidarity and fidelity to the truth require us to remember them and reject narratives that seek to render them invisible.
Second, too often it is the Church itself that appears obsessed with sex in its treatment of LGBTQ+ lives. Many LGBTQ+ couples testify that what defines them is not sex, however important, but love, fidelity, freedom, generosity, and service—echoes of the eros, philia, and agape that the Christian tradition has long recognised as the foundation of Christian marriage (however poorly that ideal has sometimes been lived, especially within patriarchal contexts).
DEFENDING THE FAMILY: WHAT FOR AND AT WHAT COST?
Finally, Pope Leo repeated a familiar pattern: identifying the family as father, mother, and children, and suggesting a link between the decline of traditional family norms and wider social crisis:
“I just wonder out loud if the question about polarization and how people treat one another doesn’t also come from situations where people did not grow up in the context of a family where we learn – that’s the first place you learn how to love one another, how to live with one another, how to tolerate one another, and how to form the bonds of communion. That’s the family. If we take away that basic building block it becomes very difficult to learn that in other ways.”
Pope Leo XIV
Supporting families is indeed essential. But history reminds us that heterosexual family life alone has never shielded societies from collapse or from grievous sins. Too often, it has even sanctified patriarchal systems in which women were objectified, stripped of agency, freedom, dignity, and aspirations, while men were trapped in rigid roles that equated strength with domination, and the repression of emotions. These aberrations were often idealised as the “Christian family.”
In this very moment, the heterosexual family model is not preventing the horrors in Gaza, in South Sudan, in Haiti, or in Ukraine. In these places, it is war, poverty, displacement, ethnic cleansing, famine, and corruption that are undermining the family—not challenges to the form of the traditional family unit.
Neither should we neglect the uncomfortable fact that Jesus himself was often strikingly dismissive of the family as a social unit. He warned that loyalty to him would divide parents and children (Mt 10:34–37), he declared that his true family are those who do the will of his Father (Mk 3:31–35; Mt 12:46–50; Lk 8:19–21), and he even said that following him requires “hating” father and mother (Lk 14:26). While Paul does give some household advice, he rarely emphasises the family, focusing instead on the new community in Christ where “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” (Gal 3:28).
At the same time, the language of “defending family values” is too often weaponised against LGBTQ+ people. Theologically, this contradicts the very vocation of the family as described by Pope Leo in the interview. Moreover, Francis in Amoris Laetitia (e.g., §274) and John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio (e.g., §18 and §21) said the family should be a school of love, patience, respect, and communion. A family, in the Christian sense, is not first and foremost defined by external form but by its witness to covenantal love, mutual service, and the transmission of life in its many forms—biological, adoptive, spiritual. To use “family” as a boundary marker or a weapon against certain people is to pervert its meaning, turning what should be a sign of communion into an instrument of exclusion and violence.
Supporting families today must mean more than (re)affirming traditional forms at the expense of others. Support means providing access to healthcare, food, and education. It means authentic and active compassion for broken families and marriages, with ecclesial words and actions that support and heal rather than condemn, burden, and exclude (cf. Mt 23:4). It also requires recognising and celebrating those who commit to one another in fidelity and love, even in the face of religious and societal stigma, sometimes at deep personal cost.
The covenant of a same-gender couple who persevere in love despite adversity and who open their home to a child already deeply wounded by the world embodies something profoundly biblical. Indeed, it echoes Pope Leo’s own definition of the family as “the first place you learn how to love one another, how to live with one another, how to tolerate one another, and how to form the bonds of communion.”
A LONG WAY TO GO
Pope Leo’s first interview offers hope that Pope Francis’ pastoral approach of welcome will be continued, albeit more quietly. It also reflects the journey the papacy (and the church) has made over the past decade, but it also shows the long road ahead. For the Church to be truly a place of welcome, healing, and prophetic witness, LGBTQ+ people must be recognised not as a “problem” to be dealt with, misguided sheep in need or new direction, a threat to be neutralised, or an anomaly to be cautiously handled, but as gifts to Christ’s Body, whose lives bear authentic testimony for the whole Church.
—Gael Pardoen, Durham University, September 26, 2025
What a profound young man and theologian! I am grateful for Gael’s astute description of true “family life,” especially in terms of Jesus’ words about family in the Gospel. Carry on, Gael!
Thank you for articulating clearly what many of us think intuitively when reading about Pope Leo’s interview. It brings some hope as we can see laid out the value of our arguments in this “discussion”. I put it in quotation marks because it feels like it has barely started, even though it has been going on for decades. Or maybe our side of the “discussion” has just been shouting in the void for all this time. Pope Leo decided to set expectations very low, wisely I suppose, emphasizing that doctrinal changes are for much later, some day. While painful, it’s better than raising expectations, which I fell for in the months leading to the Synod on Synodality, only to be so disappointed, gutted really, in the end. I’m still processing that I won’t be around to see these changes happen, or so old that it won’t change the fact that I will have spent all my life in this liminal space. I’m not sure what to make of it. If anyone here has figured it out, I’m all ears…
In 10 October 2013, Pope Francis granted a Parchment Marriage document blessing to a Filipino Gay Couple living in Los Angeles, United States of America. This Marriage Blessing document accompanied with a personal letter, Rosary and a medallion of the Immaculate Conception was administered through the Archbishop of Poland, Conrad Krajewski. Ten years later in 2023, the same Pontiff granted the blessing of Gay Couples through his Pontifical decree “Fiducia Supplicans Populum”.
Pope Francis also called several Gay parents in Italy to personally encourage their relationship and advocate that they enroll their Children in Catholic schools for private education.
In 2017, Pope Francis personally encouraged the Catholic priests at the Basilica of the Virgin of Consolation in Turin to hear their confessions and directly permit LGBT Transexuals and Sex Workers to contribute and participate in religious Marian processions and to create a pious federation for their LGBT Ministry.
Gael,
This the phrase that most struck me in your very profound, compassionate comment of Pope Leo´s comments on the family:
..¨The covenant of a same-gender couple who persevere in love despite adversity and who open their home to a child already deeply wounded by the world embodies something profoundly biblical. Indeed, it echoes Pope Leo’s own definition of the family as “the first place you learn how to love one another, how to live with one another, how to tolerate one another, and how to form the bonds of communion.” …I say this mostly because I have known beautiful examples of this. One was my classmate´s brother who not only cared for his same sex companion during sufferings and crises ¨till death when they parted¨…And another friend of my brother, who also cared for his partner, Joe, during many years of dementia before his death.. One of my deepest desires (I am a retired Redemptorist priest in Assisted Living) is for HOLY COMMUNION. And I am not just referring to the moment or “moments” after which one receives the Body and Blood of Christ”. But I am referring to ..TO WHERE AND TO WHAT the Eucharist urges us and leads us. And Gael you make very powerful comments about what FAMILY is for. I believe it is to take each of us and ALL of us to a more deep, inclusive, and NON-EXCLUSIVE ….HOLY COMMUNION. I have much, much to learn. I have hurt gay persons many times by my insensitive remarks. Your article, Gael, helps me on this unfinished journey towards full HOLY COMMUNION
Perhaps there are cases where LGBTQ+ individuals have grown up in fractured families as Pope Leo seems to indicate in this beautiful discussion of where the issue of LGBTQ+ Catholics are and are not in Pope Leo’s early tenure.
So what?
Have not many heterosexual individuals also grown up in fractured families?
And as for my gay son, he grew up in a very loving supportive family living according to love your neighbor as yourself.
I recall a transformative moment in my coming somewhat to grips (somewhat is an admission that we may (can?) never fully experience or identify with someone different from us.
It was a reply to the question, “How did you know you were gay?”
The answer was, “I just knew.”
I wasn’t really helped by or satisfied with this answer until, in time, I asked myself, “How did you know you were heterosexual?’
Surprise – “I just knew!”
I don’t offer this to suggest things are that simple. I believe strongly in the beauty and diversity of God’s creation. Mountains, plains, rivers, oceans, valleys. Species within genus in plants, animals, insects, etc.
Then we come to “man.” And there is no similar diversity in God’s creation?
What a very unsatisfying and non-inquisitive conclusion that seems to me.