Pope Francis championed inclusion. LGBTQ Catholics hope a new pope will finish what he started.

As the conclave to select a new pope begins this week, LGBTQ Catholics hope that whoever is picked will finish the inclusion work Pope Francis started more than 20 years ago. 

Pope Francis, who died at 88 last month, was the first pontiff to be publicly inclusive of the LGBTQ Catholic community. He didn’t change doctrine, but he changed the conversation by voicing support for legal civil unions, personally meeting with LGBTQ groups and extending blessings to individuals in same-sex unions.

“Francis was really a breath of fresh air, and a revolutionary in the way he was telling Church leaders to approach and relate to LGBTQ people,” said Francis DeBardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Catholic outreach that educates about and advocates for LGBTQ persons. 

DeBardo said the previous two popes before Francis held anti-gay views, probably the most strident in the Church’s history. Under Francis, the papacy adopted a different tone toward the LGBTQ community. 

Some clergy and Catholics within the community hope the conclave — in which some frontrunners appear to share Francis’s inclusive views — will continue his work. 

“Who am I to judge?”

Just four months after Francis became pope in 2013, he created controversy when, during a July inflight press conference, he responded to a journalist’s question about gay clergy members. He said: “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis’s answer went against years of Catholic precedent.

These words, which reverberated worldwide, set a very different tone from the previous relationship the Church had with gay clergy and members. His predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI were far less accepting of LGBTQ people. Benedict XVI published the first modern formal statement denouncing homosexuality in 1986. 

The treatise was written by Benedict while he was still a cardinal under Pope John Paul II. John Paul endorsed Benedict’s message, and he also explicitly denounced legal recognition for same-sex marriage. Those sentiments prevailed in 2003 when the Vatican officially opposed same-sex unions. 

In response to the Vatican’s hardline stances, LGBTQ people held protests during John Paul’s 1987 US visit. During his trip he stopped in multiple cities, but the resistance was most notable during his time in San Francisco. San Francisco was reeling from the AIDS epidemic and during the visit, the pope was met with activists holding protest signs and participating in candlelight processions and prayer vigils, hoping to enact change. 

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is an official document that outlines Catholic beliefs, the Church still views homosexual acts as “intrinsically immoral and contrary to the natural law.” The text says that homosexual tendencies are “objectively disordered.”

Cristina Traina, a professor in the Theology department at Fordham University, says the language used in the catechism to describe homosexuality doesn’t easily translate into everyday life. 

“You could read [“objectively disordered”] as just a technical term, but people read it as fundamentally evil and broken,” Traina said. “It’s a technical term, but it certainly does not work pastorally.”

With his public comments, Pope Francis began to change the narrative. Francis called homosexuality “a human fact,” during a May 2024 interview with CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell. He personally met with LGBTQ Catholic groups, including DeBardo’s New Ways Ministry, and he clarified that transgender people can be baptized and serve as godparents.  

Potential for continued progress

Traina sees the potential for continued progress within the Church despite the death of Pope Francis, because attitudes among everyday Catholics have changed.

“These things change on the ground and in practice, and then they change at the Vatican, and that’s the last thing that changes,” Traina said. 

A 2020 study from UCLA’s Williams Institute found that there were approximately 11.3 million LGBTQ adults in the U.S., and about 5.3 million of them are religious, including about 1.3 million who are Roman Catholics.

Although 69% of Americans support same sex marriage, political figures such as Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, continue to push for traditional family values and support laws allowing for religious exemptions to LGBTQ protections. While campaigning for his U.S. Senate seat in 2022, one of the laws he said he would vote ‘no’ for is the Respect for Marriage Act, which provided federal protections for same-sex and interracial marriages.   

Teresa Thompson is a member of Catholic Lesbians at the Church of St. Francis Xavier in New York. Catholic Lesbians was founded in 1995 and has over 300 members.

Thompson, who grew up Catholic, started to distance herself from religion during college, which also coincidentally was when she came out as a lesbian. Although her move away from religion was not due to her sexuality, she felt as though she couldn’t return to Catholicism. That began to shift when Francis adopted a more compassionate tone toward LGBTQ people, and Thompson discovered communities that welcomed her.

As the conclave approaches, Thompson is hopeful the new pope will continue the work Francis started. 

“I think there’s a sense of nervousness, not being sure what is going to happen,” Thompson said. “If we look at the structure of the College of Cardinals, Francis appointed so many cardinals that it seems unlikely we would … go back, but also, who’s to say?”

Sister Jeannine Gramick, co-founder of New Ways Ministry, believes the next pope will mirror the path of Pope Francis rather than undo his legacy. 

“My sense is that the cardinal electors will elect somebody who [will follow] in the footsteps of Pope Francis,” Gramick said. “So if that proves correct, then the changes that Pope Francis brought about will not be undone.”

In her conversations with LGBTQ Catholics, Gramick says that she senses a lot of hope for the future, and there is hope for a pope who will go even further than Francis did. 

“[LGBTQ] people, they’re looking for more changes, and I think the primary change they’re looking for is to change the sexual ethics teaching of the church,” Gramick said. “The catechism has not been changed yet.” 

Watching the conclave for clues

With the conclave set to begin, some of the cardinals who could be contenders seem poised to continue Francis’s legacy. As CBS News has reported, they include:

• Cardinal Peter Erdo, archbishop of Budapest, Hungary
• Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo, archbishop of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo
• Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general for the Synod of Bishops
• Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state
• Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin patriarch of Jerusalem
• Cardinal Luis Tagle of the Philippines
• Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, archbishop of Bologna, Italy
• Cardinal Anders Arborelius, archbishop of Stockholm
• Cardinal Gerald Cyprien Lacroix of Quebec

Cardinal Grech has advocated for more compassionate language when speaking about LGBTQ people and has spoken about the importance of the inclusivity of all members, including LGBTQ people, according to New Ways Ministry. 

Cardinal Tagle has also spoken compassionately about LGBTQ Catholics and was an ally of Francis. Cardinal Zuppi is another contender supportive of Francis’s embrace of LGBTQ Catholics, according to New Ways Ministry. 

“I am voting for Cardinal Tagle to be the first Filipino pope,” Thompson said. “I think in character and ideas, he’s very similar to Francis, and I used to live in the Philippines, so I also have a special place in my heart for the idea of a Filipino pope.”

Traina says she is also hopeful for someone like Tagle, but notes that predicting who will be the new pope is almost impossible. 

“It’s often hard to tell what (a cardinal) will actually do when they get into the papacy, because Francis was also a surprise,” Traina said. “Since we have a global College of Cardinals, now the list of possibilities is much longer.” 

Although Thompson is throwing her personal support behind Cardinal Tagle, she urges the electorate to set aside their political motivations while casting their votes. 

“I really hope this will be a moment where leaders can practice what they preach,” Thompson said. “In Ignatian spirituality, there’s a practice of making decisions through discernment, [where you] let go … of your preconceived notions [and] allow the Holy Spirit to guide you. … I would say please try to let politics go and try to listen to how the church really wants to move forward.”