By Naomi Ishisaka

When Pope Francis met in October with leaders of the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics at the Vatican, Seattle’s Leo Egashira said it was a pivotal moment.

Given the “glacial” pace of change for the church, he said the picture of LGBTQ+ Catholic leaders meeting with the pope would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago.

Egashira, who was a longtime board member of DignityUSA, a U.S. organization that advocates for LGBTQ+ Catholics and is involved in the Global Network, said the meeting was a “tacit blessing” and an opening that portends great hope for change in the church.

Then last month’s decision by Pope Francis to allow blessings for same-sex couples took that change a step further.

“I think it’s an acknowledgment that our voices are being heard, and that the leaders are realizing that all people are part of the church and that it’s not an exclusive club,” Egashira said. “I think that the current pope has a very pastoral leadership style, and that pastoral leadership style calls for inclusivity.” Egashira described a pastoral approach as seeing and addressing the personal and spiritual needs of an individual as opposed to judging people for their adherence to specific rules.

But, he said, it is just a first step. “Eventually, I hope it does lead to not only acceptance, but support for LGBTQ Catholics,” he said. “Acceptance is the lowest minimum bar. And this is a step toward that. But I think people deserve and want much more than that.”

Egashira was born into a Seattle Japanese American Catholic family and is a member of the Central District’s multicultural Immaculate Conception Church. He is one of only two of his surviving eight siblings who is still part of the church. Egashira said most of his siblings no longer found the church to be aligned with their beliefs or relevant to their lives.

As a proud gay man, Egashira is determined to stay and fight for change in the church from within.

While the focus of DignityUSA has long been on inclusion for LGBTQ+ Catholics, Egashira emphasizes that addressing misogyny and patriarchy in the church are also critical to making progressive change.

“The basic cause of homophobia is misogyny,” he said. “You’re not going to be able to address homophobia … or transphobia adequately without addressing misogyny. It’s the fear and hatred of women that animates transphobia and homophobia.”

Bishop Edward Donalson III, of the Center for Ecumenical and Interreligious Engagement at Seattle University and a board member of Faith Action Network, agrees.

Donalson said at the root, it’s the “hatred of the feminine” that undergirds homophobia. “All anti-LGBTQ ideology is moored in misogyny and cis hetero patriarchy — not just patriarchy, it’s a specific cis hetero patriarchy,” he said. “Cis” is shorthand for cisgender, or a person whose gender identity aligns with the gender they were assigned at birth.

It’s important to understand, Donalson said, that the pope’s statement on blessing same-sex couples does not change Catholic theology.

“It does not make same-gender marriage sacramental,” Donalson said. “And that’s an important distinction, both for Catholics who are worried that their church is changing and for LGBTQ folks who might be somewhat deceived by what the messaging is, or somewhat confused by the messaging.”

But, he said, the statement does acknowledge the humanity of LGBTQ+ Catholics who choose to be legally married in the places around the world where legal marriage is an option. It’s not surprising that it came from Francis, Donalson said, because “everything about Pope Francis has been a clear indicator that he has an eye toward compassion. And this is directly in line with his eye toward compassion.”

Yet most importantly, Donalson said the pope’s statement is an opportunity for the church to have a deeper conversation about what it means to bless and what it means to marry. “I think what the pope has done is presented an opportunity for the church to interrogate itself,” he said.

Donalson said that despite all that could be said about the church, it creates community and a place for people to connect to something bigger than themselves worldwide. “People — particularly post pandemic, in an era of absolute isolation — are drawn to places of community, compassion, care,” he said.

Egashira said it’s a deep commitment to caring for all people through charitable work and pastoral care that represents the best of the church.

“The core tenets are, I think, unassailable. And almost anyone can live with it. It’s this when you get all the trappings, the institutional trappings and the power and the politics that go along with it, that it becomes perverted,” he said.

“In times past … the Catholic Church has been the strongest proponent of civil rights and equality,” Egashira said. “And so that aspect I do like, but the fact that in its own house that it has a severe form of misogyny, severe homophobia, it’s really hard to reconcile that with many of the good actions of the Catholic Church.”

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— For some, it’s a watershed moment and for others it’s a piddling half-step. But it has the radical potential to encourage some very important conversations.

By Michael F. Pettinger

I like to remind friends that December 25 is just the first of the 12 days of Christmas. The gift wrap and bows might already be in the garbage, but there’s still the problem of what to do with the presents, particularly the big, awkward ones we didn’t necessarily ask for. A case in point is the gift the Vatican gave in late December when it granted permission for priests to extend a blessing to Catholics in “irregular” relationships. The term refers to heterosexuals in relationships not sanctioned by the church as well as same-sex couples, but most of the media attention has been trained on the latter. And while a great deal has already been written on the subject, we’re still sorting out what it means.

For those who follow the church, the announcement wasn’t a complete surprise. As early as 2021, there was talk that Pope Francis was not happy with the decision of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF, a body that promulgates Catholic doctrine) to ban the blessing of such unions. The DDF stated that there was too much risk that they would be “confused” with sacramental marriages and that it was, in any event, impossible to bless something that is not “objectively and positively ordered to receive and express grace.” That ban, however, did not stop bishops in Belgium and Germany from advancing plans to formally bless such unions. The fact that these moves were part of the “synodal path” Francis is fostering further complicated the situation. The pope could not forbid them from going forward without appearing inconsistent, nor could he simply silence other bishops who complained that the Germans and Belgians were on the road to “heresy” and “schism.”

In the words of Jesuit priest and writer Father James Martin, the December 18 declaration, Fiducia supplicans, can be seen as Francis’s attempt to “thread the needle.” Rather than flatly contradicting the DDF’s previous ban on blessing gay couples, the document draws a careful distinction between the formal blessings bestowed in a sacrament like marriage and the less formal blessings offered as part of the day-to-day pastoral activity of a priest. On the one hand, it heads off initiatives like those proposed in Germany and Belgium that might “confuse” same-sex unions with marriage, which the document still defines as “exclusive, stable, and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the generation of children.” At the same time, it permits priests to acknowledge and bless what is good in those relationships, and to pray that the couple involved might “live better”—a point to which we will have to return.

Not surprisingly, the declaration was met with a mix of jubilation and moral outrage. Father Martin, known for his efforts to encourage greater rapprochement between the church hierarchy and the LGBTQ community, published a photo of himself blessing two men clasping each other’s hands. At the same time, bishop conferences in Cameroon, Zambia, and Malawi have all formally forbidden priests from offering such blessings, denouncing the distinction made in the document between sacramental and non-sacramental blessings as “hypocritical.”

Less expected was the ambivalence, anger, and cynicism expressed by some LGBTQ Catholics. Mary Pezzulo, a bisexual woman in a heterosexual marriage who is well-known as a Catholic blogger, complained that the declaration is “in some ways a laughably tiny concession. In other ways, it’s a monumental step forward.” Others have been less nuanced. When asked whether he and his husband would now have their relationship blessed by a priest, my best friend told me in language too colorful for The Nation what those priests could do to themselves.

This attitude is indicative of the damage the church’s treatment of LGBTQ people has already done. It’s no secret that church membership in the United States has dropped in the last few decades, and, according to the Pew Research Center, no other religious community has suffered more precipitous losses than the Catholic Church. While there seem to be no figures for Catholics in particular, a survey published last May by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 30 percent of US adults who have left a religious community say they did so at least partially because of negative teachings regarding LGBTQ people. Offering blessings to same-sex couples might be a welcome development to those who still care about the church, but it’s not clear that it will have any effect on those who have already given up on it.

Indeed, the long-term effects of the decision are almost impossible to predict. The angry statements of the African bishops and US conservatives might raise the same specter of schism that haunted the movement to formalize blessings among the German and Belgian bishops—though the fact that Fiducia supplicans emphasizes the private, informal nature of the blessing will make it difficult for anyone to break communion with anyone else. How would any bishop or priest know that another has blessed an LGBTQ couple, unless, like Father Martin, they make it public?

The privacy of the blessings might, in fact, prove to be the stroke of genius in the declaration, insofar as it encourages on the private level the kind of dialogue Francis has been urging in the synodal process. Like other moves the DDF has made in recent weeks—the statement that transgender individuals can be baptized and serve as godparents and the reminder that women cannot be denied communion because they are single mothers—it creates occasions for new kinds of conversation. Admittedly, some of those conversations will be awkward. As Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice and a lesbian, pointed out, “Given the homophobic and transphobic climate created by many bishops in the United States, the average same-sex couple likely still won’t feel comfortable presenting themselves to their local bishop or priest to ask for a blessing.” But the discomfort goes both ways. One priest on what we used to call Twitter complained that the declaration would put him in the position of saying no to people asking for blessings. In effect, both sides foresee the sort of difficult, face-to-face interactions that one expects around the family dinner table this time of year.

The declaration, then, could prove to be a gift that won’t stop giving, and that might be more than Francis bargained for. While I don’t doubt the sincerity of his desire to open the church to LGBTQ people, all indications are that his understanding of sex and gender is traditional and essentialist. The African bishops might not be completely wrong to call the declaration “hypocritical,” since the word derives from a Greek term that, among other things, means “actor.” There is bound to be an element of falseness in offering a blessing that same-sex couples will “live better” if living better is understood to live no longer as a couple. At least part of the resentment some LGBTQ Catholics feel is that these blessings will be just a kind of noblesse oblige, another bit of condescending theater meant to make cis-heterosexuals feel better about themselves.

But all those difficult conversations unleashed by the declaration could also help push that cis-heterosexual paradigm from the center of our understanding of sex and relationships and leave us looking instead at what it means to love. And that might be the glorious possibility hidden in this very awkward Christmas gift.

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