Over the past week, two leading European cardinals, both of whom enjoy broad favour with Pope Francis, have made public statements calling for a change in the Catholic Church’s current position on the issues of homosexuality and priestly celibacy.
In an interview published in Germany’s Catholic News Agency (KNA) earlier this week, Jesuit Cardinal Jean Claude Hollerich, Archbishop of Luxembourg, voiced his belief that the Church’s position viewing homosexual relationships is wrong.
“I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is no longer correct,” he said, saying the time has come to revise this position, and suggesting that Pope Francis’s own rhetoric on homosexuality could open the door for this change to take place.
Since the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Francis, who has also voiced concern over homosexuality in the priesthood, has taken a softer approach to the issue and has urged the Church to be more welcoming to homosexual individuals and to families with homosexual members.
In 2013, he signalled a new approach to the issue with his famous declaration that if a person “is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will… Who am I to judge?”
In 2018, he said that the Church has to find a way to help the parents of gays and lesbians so that they “stand by” their children, telling parents with LGBT children, “Do not condemn. Dialogue. Understand. Make space for the son or daughter; make space so they express themselves.”
During an interview in 2019, Francis said he does not think it’s rare for parents to have a homosexual child and said that homosexual tendencies “are not a sin,” insisting that tendencies themselves “are not sin. If you have a tendency to anger, it’s not a sin. Now, if you are angry and hurt people, the sin is there.”
Last year, he met with a group of parents of LGBT children, telling them that God loves their children as they are, and that the Church loves them because they are “children of God.”