Archbishop Bergoglio and the Church of the Analogue of St. Joseph of Assisi: A Tale of Two Bishops and Two Priests

As soon as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected pope in 2013, he made his first big decision: taking the name of Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi. He signaled a desire to cast his lot with the poor and those on the margins by doing so. He did more for one globally marginalized group than all his predecessors combined.

Francis was very compassionate for the people of L.G.B.T.Q. As a Jesuit, he took a person’s conscience seriously, an emphasis in Jesuit spirituality, meaning that he was less likely to condemn people seen by many previous church leaders solely as “sinners.” The church had a problem with families with L.G.B.T.Q. members. The pope wanted the church to be a place for everyone, and so he reached out to those who felt left out. Even if he did not change the church’s official teaching that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law,” Francis’s drastically new approach was itself a kind of teaching.

People who doubt the effectiveness of his approach should look at what they have seen in the church, as well as the increasing number of L.G.B.T.Q. groups and retreats. In January, Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, issued an apology for the church’s mistreatment of L.G.B.T.Q. people. The Vatican has added a mass for L.G.B.T.Q. people to its official list of events.

My reporting reinforced the widespread perception that the priesthood had many gay men and that the nuns had many lesbians. It was clear that many of the superiors of the priests and nuns knew what was going on and were unperturbed by it. The prevalence of lesbians and gays in Catholic orders is known, but it isn’t really secretive and it is more like a discreet understanding. A whole class of people were called into question by Roman Catholicism. That is what I mean by Hypocritical.

When covering the church, I often found myself across a lunch or dinner table from a priest who recognized that I was gay, communicated his unalloyed comfort with that and spoke in a way that assumed my awareness that he was gay, too. The ease of it was moving, but also not quite right. I wasn’t sure what his message was in the church.