Feature image by Franco Origlia via Getty Images

Growing up queer and Catholic my childhood was one defined by tension; I wanted to become both a bishop and a woman. Pope John Paul II was on the throne of St Peter for most of that time and I doubt very much that he would’ve supported me in either career. The AIDS crisis had both traumatised a generation and calcified the Church’s teaching on LGBTQ people. Midway through John Paul’s reign the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith described homosexuality as a ‘tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil,” in a lovely letter authored by his successor, the future Pope Benedict XVI.

During his own papacy Benedict doubled down on this rhetoric, lobbying against gay marriage, tacitly supporting Uganda’s increased criminalisation of homosexuality, and suggesting gender ideology was a greater danger to humanity than deforestation. He caused the ultimate controversy in 2013 when he stepped down from office (the first pope to do so for 600 years). Officially this was for health reasons, but I suspect it was more likely because he knew deep down in his heart of hearts, he just wasn’t photogenic enough.

When Pope Francis was elected the 266th pontiff, I was so estranged from my religion that it barely registered with me. It wasn’t that I had lost my faith in God — I still prayed, I still made visits to chapels and basilicae — rather I had lost faith in the Church. The all-encompassing love of God, the tender compassion of Christ, those values I was taught as central to Catholicism seemed entirely absent from the Church. What difference would another pope make to me? Indeed I was so disenchanted that I wasn’t even paying attention when (barely a year in) Pope Francis told a plane full of journalists, “”If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”

This statement might not seem like much, it could almost seem like side-stepping of the whole question, but it represented a major tonal shift for the Catholic Church. It was followed by an insistence from His Holiness that the families of gay people must not disown them but rather love and support them, by a push for decriminalization of homosexuality globally, and the statement that queer people can be Godparents and witnesses at weddings, and can themselves be baptised. He even made the extraordinary move to officially permit priests to bless same-sex unions.

Of course the catechism did not change. Teaching still regards same-sex relations (though not attraction) as sinful. Indeed many people think Pope Francis did not go far enough, and that by not fundamentally altering doctrine continued to fail LGBTQ people. He referred to homosexuality rather lovelessly as “a human fact” and spoke out against the “evil of gender ideology.” On paper it did at times feel as though he were wandering off into the haze of love the sinner.

But then we look at his actions. As a transgender woman, I was particularly moved by how he elevated women to senior positions in the Roman Dicasteries, and by his letters to Sister Mónica Astorga Cremona, blessing her housing complex for impoverished trans women in Neuquén, Argentina. He befriended a group of migrant trans sex workers living in the suburbs of Rome during the Covid-19 pandemic, sending them financial aid and arranging for them to have their vaccinations at the Vatican, as well as meeting them for lunch several times. There’s also a beautiful clip of him accepting a copy of Trans Life and the Catholic Church Today (co-edited by my friend Nicolete Burbach) from our mutual George White. George is himself an out trans man and seeing the pope acknowledging him as so and shaking his hand was such a beacon of hope. I cannot impress upon you enough how unthinkable any of this would’ve been even a decade earlier. Can you imagine any other pope landing on the cover of The Advocate as person of the year?

Of course, this is without reference to his calls for climate justice, his rejection of the more lavish trappings of the papacy, his prioritization of the poor, his constant support for Palestine and Ukraine, his insistence that all good people can make it to Heaven despite their particular denomination. All of which explains why some 400,000 people turned out for his funeral this weekend, he was very loved. At Francis’ request forty of Rome’s “poor and needy” were invited to form an honour guard to greet the coffin at his final resting place of Santa Maria Maggiore, a cohort which included migrants, prisoners, and trans women.

I wasn’t in Rome for the occasion, though I was lucky enough to attend an audience with His Holiness in February. We couldn’t have known it then, but it was to be the pope’s penultimate general audience, nine days later he was admitted to hospital with pneumonia. The audience marked one of the high points in my journey back to the Church, there was no suggestion that I didn’t belong there, only a warm feeling of welcome. His papacy had shown me that there was a place for me in the faith, by constantly underscoring the all-encompassing love of God, the tender compassion of Christ which I had so long found missing. With that I was able to return to regular church attendance, and I even began to read at Mass. I started volunteering for a diocesan homeless lunch service and was finally confirmed, as Lauren. The simple fact is that Pope Francis made it possible for me, and many other queer and trans Catholics, to participate fully in the life of the Church.

He wasn’t perfect, no, no one is. But to his credit Francis was more than aware of his failings, talking of himself as a sinner and asking that people pray for him from the very start of his time in office. His papacy was one of tension, yes, but that is the way of faith, of believing in what we can never prove to be true. In the New Testament Paul tells us we are saved by faith alone, while James tells us faith is meaningless without good works to prove it. Such sites of apparent friction are numerous and have often been the source of much bitterness and bloodshed. But, rather than defining orthodoxy yet more tightly, Pope Francis asserted the primacy of our shared humanity above rigid dogma. In doing so he showed us that the word is alive, ever flowering as our understanding of it evolves. From here on we can only trust to the Holy Spirit that his successor will be as open-minded, as willing to listen and learn, as humble as Pope Francis. And, of course, just as photogenic.

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