Pope Francis, Pope Leo, and Me

Today’s post is from guest blogger Robert Shine (he/him). Bob is the executive director of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace, a part of the global Catholic peace movement. He previously served at New Ways Ministry from 2012-2024, including many years as Bondings Managing Editor. He is a co-author of A Home for All: A Catholic Call for LGBTQ Non-Discrimination, and has degrees in theology from The Catholic University of America and Boston College. 

This post is the second part of a two-par series on Pope Leo’s first year.  The first part, by Francis DeBernardo, New Ways Ministry’s executive director, can be found here. 

I am not someone who easily admits to being wrong. But the anniversary this week of Pope Leo XIV’s election has me considering how I felt one year ago—and the ways he has (thankfully) proven me wrong.

My first foray into LGBTQ+ ministry was in college. In 2010, we formed a student group to provide mutual support on a hostile Catholic campus. Two years later, I joined New Ways Ministry’s staff. This was the era of Pope Benedict XVI, who collaborated successfully with Pope John Paul II to quash much of Vatican II’s progress. Indeed, by 2013, I fully intended to leave any ministry. Once an aspiring priest, I considered any number of paths outside the church. It was a long ecclesial winter in the only church I knew in my first 22 years, and a career in LGBTQ+ ministry was unfathomable.

Pope Francis

When Pope Francis was elected, I sat alone in New Ways’ kitchen watching the Sistine Chapel’s chimney. Other staff were in El Salvador for a conference. Suddenly, white smoke billowed and, after a long wait, a name foreign to most of us, Jose Marie Bergoglio, was announced–and took an unprecedented name: Francis. 

I was skeptical, and I was not alone in my skepticism. Here was a pope from the Global South, and one dedicated to the poor in real, material ways–a sign of hope. But he was a Jesuit, and reportedly no progressive. Rumors that Bergoglio had collaborated—or at least shown a lack of courage—during Argentina’s Dirty War swirled. I scrambled to figure out his LGBTQ record, and it was mediocre at best.

But, then: “Who am I to judge?” These words changed everything. Here was a pope who used the word “gay” and who affirmed gay men could be good priests. Then Pope Francis took more small steps, bit by bit, interrupted by some missteps. The door to reform, once closed and locked, was slightly ajar. There was some breathing room now, an opening to take bold risks and work creatively. This pope would not be a revolutionary, but we could be. I was in. 

Pope Leo XIV

Pope Francis changed me. He taught me. He angered me. He gave me joy. Ultimately, he loved us imperfectly. And I loved him, imperfectly. From this love came breakthroughs. I joined New Ways Ministry for two extensive private audiences with Francis. At the second one, we brought transgender and intersex Catholics, their parents, and a doctor providing gender-affirming care to tell the pope their stories. If I had ever doubted God’s promise to save us, I haven’t since. It was a mountaintop moment, a trans-figuration, one of the holiest moments of my 33 years. 

I grieved when Pope Francis died, and that grief compounded when I thought his successor Leo would fail us. The gains made would not all be lost, but momentum would stall. The room to work might be narrower, the door swinging backwards.The promise of synodality was, in many ways, tarnished if we hoped for a renewed church. I had witnessed firsthand in Rome the Synod’s two assemblies, and while not outright failures, certainly they were not great.

Robert Shine

Pope Leo’s election had left me despondent for a time. How could the cardinals elect someone from the U.S., a seeming creature of the Curia, someone whose record on LGBTQ+ inclusion was, in my most generous read, mediocre. 

Gratefully, I was wrong. Totally wrong.

Conclaves are political, and there is an excitement in the politicking, watching cardinals’ stars rise and fall. But I shortchanged the Holy Spirit—and Her ability to use politics for good. Pope Leo is the very pope we need for our historical moment. Despite all the Vatican’s corruption, God prevailed. 

The Leonine era began in a crazed time. We are a Church and a world in multidimensional crises. A series of posts could be written analyzing Leo’s actions, statements, and omissions just on gender and sexuality, never mind wider Church reform, genocides in Palestine and Sudan, the rise of authoritarianism, the Trump administration’s provocations, and the World War III in piecemeal we endure. 

All that analysis can be distilled into the simple truth that LGBTQ+ Catholic advocates have championed for decades: social justice is a constitutive part of the Church’s mission to evangelize, and thus social justice should be the lens through which we evaluate everything else. 

While on his apostolic visit to four African nations, Pope Leo was asked about blessing same-gender couples, a flashpoint for the continent’s church after Fiducia Supplicans’ release. His response? “The unity or division of the Church should not revolve around sexual matters. . .I believe there are much greater and more important issues such as justice, equality. . .that would all take ​priority before that particular issue.”

Pope Leo seems to believe and live this truth. In my current work with Pax Christi International, we have celebrated the pope’s unceasing calls for an “unarmed and disarming peace,” moving the Church towards an embrace and practice of Gospel nonviolence. The cry for peace—not concerns about marriage equality or transgender healthcare or blessings—are what our pope demands that we attend to again and again and again. That approach sounds very similar to Jesus’ own ministry.

Leo’s words have another historical echo: the Washington State Catholic bishops’ 1983 statement that “…the prejudice against homosexuals is a greater infringement of the norms of Christian morality than is homosexual orientation or activity.” 

It has taken Church leaders decades just to return to where they were in the 1970s and 1980s—though many of us never left Vatican II’s path. But we have made it. Social justice is again becoming the foremost lens through which the Church, institutionally, is interpreting faith in the modern world. 

Where I thought Pope Leo would stall Francis’ momentum, he sustains that path in his own key. Leo is different from his predecessor in many ways—temperament, spontaneity, liturgical taste, and so on—but he is the same in ways that matter most. For us, as LGBTQ+ advocates, loved ones, and people of good will, we, too, must sustain the momentum. Fifteen years ago, my imagination could have never envisioned today’s Church. Can you imagine what is possible in fifteen more years? 

With trust in the Holy Spirit, we must keep taking risks, working creatively, demanding justice. Let us realize Pope Francis’ dream of a Church that is “home for all” existing in a world marked by Pope Leo’s desire for an “unarmed and disarming peace.” 

–Robert Shine (he/him), May 9, 2026

For further reading:

For all of Bondings 2.0’s posts about Pope Leo XIV, click here