CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell asked Pope Francis on Sunday about the blessings for same-sex unions he seemed to sanctify last year.
In his latest explanation, the Pope said the church can only bless individual homosexuals. In other words, there is now and never was a blessing for same-sex unions!
Norah O’Donnell posed a straightforward question the the Catholic leader.
“Last year, you decided to allow Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples,” O’Donnell That’s a big change. Why?”
“No, what I allowed was not to bless the union. That cannot be done because that is not the sacrament. I cannot. The Lord made it that way. But to bless each person, yes. The blessing is for everyone. To bless a homosexual-type union, however, goes against the Church’s law. But to bless each person, why not? The blessing is for all.”
Why the subject ever arose then, who knows?
There was a widespread belief at the time that Francis supported the blessings of same-sex unions. The statement prompted celebration among same-sex Catholics at what they perceived as progress in the church. Meanwhile, conservative Catholics attacked the Pope openly for his perceived support of same-sex unions.
Responses to questions about blessings and same-sex unions have been ambiguous in the months since.
Francis continually criticizes conservative bishops, recently, for example, calling conservatism a suicidal attitude.
But he also regularly reminds everyone that same-sex unions go against Church law.
Which is the bit in the Bible that says, “Thou shalt have thy cake and eat it too?”
Pope Francis being interviewed by CBS’ Norah O’Donnell on “60 Minutes.”
By Rebecca Falconer
Pope Francis responded to U.S. conservative bishops’ criticisms of his progressive shift to Roman Catholic Church doctrine in an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” airing Sunday evening.
Details: The pope noted during the interview via a Spanish translator that the adjective “conservative” in such instances was “one who clings to something and does not want to see beyond that.”
He added: “It is a suicidal attitude. Because one thing is to take tradition into account, to consider situations from the past, but quite another is to be closed up inside a dogmatic box.”
Why it matters: Since being elected pope in 2013, Francis has advocated for progressive issues and moved to make the Catholic Church more welcoming to LGBTQ+ people while at the same time upholding its historical views on the sacrament of marriage — angering some conservatives in the process.
What he’s saying: During his CBS interview, Francis clarified his position on allowing priests to bless same-sex couples.
“What I allowed was not to bless the union,” the 87-year-old pontiff told CBS’ Norah O’Donnell. “That cannot be done because that is not the sacrament. … But to bless each person, yes. The blessing is for everyone,” he added.
“To bless a homosexual-type union, however, goes against the given right, against the law of the Church. But to bless each person, why not? The blessing is for all. Some people were scandalized by this. But why?”
O’Donnell noted that the pope had previously said that “homosexuality is not a crime,” to which Francis replied: “It is a human fact.”
Zoom in: The pope also criticized Texas officials’ efforts to shut down a Catholic charity that offers undocumented immigrants humanitarian assistance as part of a wider crackdown at the state’s border with Mexico.
“That is madness. Sheer madness. To close the border and leave them there, that is madness,” he said.
“The migrant has to be received. Thereafter you see how you are going to deal with him. Maybe you have to send him back, I don’t know, but each case ought to be considered humanely.”
On surrogacy, the pontiff said in the “strictest sense of the term” it is not authorized by Vatican doctrine.
But when O’Donnell noted sometimes this was the only hope for women, Francis replied: “It could be. The other hope is adoption.”
He said in each case the situation “should be carefully and clearly considered, consulting medically and then morally as well.”
The pope said he thinks there’s a general rule in these cases, “but you have to go into each case in particular to assess the situation, as long as the moral principle is not skirted.”
He then told O’Donnell she was right in her assertion. “I really liked your expression when you told me, ‘In some cases it is the only chance,'” he said. “It shows that you feel these things very deeply.”
Diocesan hermits by nature don’t get much attention. A small subset of religious persons, hermits mostly spend their lives engaged in quiet prayer.
Brother Christian Matson, a Catholic diocesan hermit in Kentucky, has spent years doing just that. His monk’s habit might catch his neighbors’ eye, but he is known in the town where he lives primarily through his work with the local theater.
But recently Matson decided that his faith compels him to make a little more noise than usual.
“This Sunday, Pentecost 2024, I’m planning to come out publicly as transgender,” Matson told Religion News Service on Friday (May 17), saying he was speaking out with the permission of his bishop, John Stowe of the Diocese of Lexington in Kentucky.
Matson, who is also a Benedictine oblate, believes he is the first openly transgender person in his position in the Catholic Church. It is a difficult claim to confirm — even Stowe told RNS he did not know for sure if Matson is the first — but Matson’s status is at least highly unusual, and comes at time when church officials are grappling with how to address transgender Catholics.
According to Matson, 39, his “disclosing,” as he describes it, is a moment years in the making. He offered his story as indicative of the often difficult path for trans Catholics, including those seeking life as a religious — a category that includes brothers and nuns.
“I am currently based in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky,” he wrote in an email to friends and supporters on Sunday. “I live in a hermitage at the top of a wooded hill, which I share with my German Shepherd rescue, Odie, and with the Blessed Sacrament, which was installed in my oratory shortly before Christmas.”
Raised in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Matson converted to Catholicism in 2010 — four years, he noted, after transitioning in college, a step he refers to as a part of his “medical history” rather than a “central part of my personal identity.” After his conversion, Matson felt called to minister to people working in the arts, but knew he would encounter “issues” because of a 2000 Vatican document that, according to a Catholic News Service report from the time, declared that anyone who had undergone “sex-change” was ineligible “to marry, be ordained to the priesthood or enter religious life.”
Matson approached a canon lawyer to discuss his options and was told that only two aspects of Catholic life were categorically off the table: marriage and the priesthood. According to Matson, the canon lawyer recommended being upfront about his status as a transgender man in any vocational conversations with church leaders and noted the role of a diocesan hermit, which may prove less challenging enlisting with an existing religious order.
The canon lawyer, Matson said, effectively conveyed to him “there’s no problem as long as there’s a bishop who will accept you, because there’s no distinction by sex and you’re not in a community — you’re by yourself.”
What followed was roughly a decade of searching and no small amount of rejection. Living in the United Kingdom while pursuing a master’s degree and later a Ph.D. in theology, Matson entered a vocational discernment program and approached the Jesuit order to ask if he could join.
“They said, ’No, we just don’t see how this would work for us,’ which was crushing, because that’s where I felt called,” Matson said.
Other communities offered similar responses, when they responded at all. “People who knew me said, ‘You clearly have a religious vocation,’ and these were all people who knew my medical history,” Matson said. “But when they would go to the people in the community in charge of making that decision, they … would often just refuse to even meet with me.”
In one instance, Matson said, a religious leader declined to meet simply to hear his experience as a trans man, saying doing so would be “a waste of time.”
But Matson’s call to religious life wouldn’t abate. While visiting a monastery during a retreat, he found himself unable to sleep, consumed with the idea of starting “a religious community of and for artists — artists who are living together, (operating) in the church through their art, and ministering to the loneliness and sense of precarity many artists experience.”
In 2015, he returned to New York City, where he had attended college. Having already taking private vows of poverty, chastity and obedience — witnessed by his spiritual director — before he arrive, he co-created a nonprofit called the Catholic Artist Connection. The group hosted retreats and connected artists to resources such as the Archdiocese of New York’s Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, where Matson began working as a programming associate.
Matson kept running into artists who wanted to pursue religious life, he said, and continued to feel the tug himself. But roadblocks kept appearing. “As I spoke to friends in the archdiocese, I knew somebody with a trans background was never going to be accepted into religious life in the Archdiocese of New York,” Matson said.
He tried again after a move to Minnesota in 2018, but his entreaties to various religious communities and orders were also rejected.
“I thought, well, if I can’t find a religious community to sponsor me, maybe what I need is a bishop,” Matson said.
A priest friend recommended different bishops to contact, beginning with Stowe, who was emerging as a leading voice among Catholics calling for a more tolerant approach to LGBTQ people. In 2020, Matson sent Stowe a letter, conveying his status as a transgender man, his vision for an artists’ community and his pull to religious life.
Stowe wrote back immediately, expressing his openness.
“It was an enormous relief,” Matson said. “I was in tears. I felt my hope revive.”
Stowe confirmed Matson’s account, saying the then-aspiring brother was recommended to him by a number of people.
“My willingness to be open to him is because it’s a sincere person seeking a way to serve the church,” Stowe said of Matson. “Hermits are a rarely used form of religious life … but they can be either male or female. Because there’s no pursuit of priesthood or engagement in sacramental ministry, and because the hermit is a relatively quiet and secluded type of vocation, I didn’t see any harm in letting him live this vocation.”
He added that Matson’s spiritual journey was “consistent with the calling of that particular vocation.”
Bishop John Stowe.
Matson moved to Kentucky, having already made progress on Stowe’s suggestion that he link up with an additional community through which to experience religious life. Matson entered the novitiate at a Benedictine monastery in 2021, hoping the formation offered by that path would eventually help him form a new religious community for artists.
Finally, in August 2022, Matson took his first vows as a diocesan hermit — a yearlong commitment — under Stowe’s direction.
For the next year, Matson “lived a life of basically spending half the day in prayer and half the day doing some form of work” that included producing and writing at a local theater.
Three years earlier, Matson read with frustration a document issued by the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education titled “Male and Female He Created Them: Toward a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education.” The instructional letter rejected “calls for public recognition of the right to choose one’s gender.”
In 2021, the Diocese of Marquette, in Michigan, followed with its own instruction to priests to refuse transgender people asking to be baptized or confirmed until they have “repented.”
“It was suddenly becoming a lot more difficult in the church to be trans,” Matson said.
The Rev. Andrea Conocchia, center, introduces members of the Torvaianica transgender community to Pope Francis on Aug. 11, 2022, during the pope’s general audience at the Vatican.
But tolerance seems to be growing in some quarters. While Pope Francis has opposed elements of gender theory and recently called its proposals “ugly,” he has also met and dined with groups of transgender people.
In November 2023, the Vatican doctrine department ruled that transgender people may be baptized and serve as witnesses at Catholic weddings, so long as doing so “doesn’t cause scandal among the faithful.”
In the United States in March, a coalition led by Catholic nuns released a letter voicing support for transgender, nonbinary and gender-expansive individuals, implicitly rebuking a statement put forward by group of U.S. Catholic bishops discouraging Catholic health care groups from performing various gender-affirming medical procedures.
But overall, “Vatican-level documents that have come out on the subject have not engaged with the science at all,” Matson said, adding that he believes many diocesan-level statements are inconsistent in their attempts to categorize gender and cite scientific studies misleadingly. Matson has sent multiple private letters to Vatican offices, urging them to engage with transgender people and arguing that the church can embrace transgender people while maintaining orthodoxy.
As trans rights began to be debated in statehouses across the United States in recent months, conservative lawmakers have begun pushing bans on providing gender-affirming care for youth and, in some cases, adults.
Matson vented his frustrations to Stowe and his spiritual director, saying he wanted to speak out. But he said he was advised to first “build a foundation” in religious life for several years.
During that time, Matson had an experience that shook him. Attending a friend’s play in his religious habit, he was approached by a student who identified as trans and nonbinary. After asking if Matson was a monk, the student said they were raised Catholic, but that their parents had rejected their identity, and the student felt like they “don’t have a place in the church anymore.”
Matson responded by saying there were people in the church who would support the student, and Matson prayed with them, asking God to show the student how they are “wonderful the way you’ve made them.” The student, Matson said, grew emotional, thanking the hermit profusely and saying, “No one from the church has ever affirmed me for who I am.”
Matson, who renewed his vows in 2023, eventually began mulling a date to go public with his status. “I have to say something,” Matson told his spiritual director. He settled on Pentecost, which emphasizes preaching “the good news of God’s love to everyone,” he said. It was also the day in the church calendar when he’d been baptized years before.
“I can’t stand by and let this false and, at times, culpably ignorant understanding of what it means to be transgender continue to hurt people,” he said. “If I don’t say anything and allow the church to continue to make decisions based on incorrect information, then I’m not serving the church.”
Both Matson and Stowe said they are bracing for blowback after Sunday’s announcement. Matson said he is largely unconcerned with “online trolls” but is sensitive to people who are “legitimately concerned” that “accepting a trans person into religious life means Catholic anthropology gets thrown out the window.”
For people with such concerns, he said, he looks forward to engaging in dialogue. “I don’t have a hidden agenda, I just want to serve the church,” he said. “People can believe that or not.”
Both the hermit and his bishop are prepared for the possibility that church officials may push for Matson’s removal. Stowe acknowledged that “if I’m told to by higher authorities, then I will have to deal with that at the time.”
Matson bristled at the idea of leaving the church, which he called “my family.” “I’m Catholic,” he said. “I became Catholic after I transitioned because of the Catholic understanding — the sacramental understanding — of the body, of creation, of the desirability of the visible unity of the church, and primarily because of the Eucharist.”
At the very least, Matson said, he hopes going public will spark dialogue about his fellow transgender Catholics, a discussion he believes can enhance unity among the body of believers.
“You’ve got to deal with us, because God has called us into this church,” he said. “It’s not your church to kick us out of — this is God’s church, and God has called us and engrafted us into it.”
Last week, hundreds of United Methodist Church (UMC) delegates from around the world sat down to vote on whether or not to reverse a longstanding ban on the ordination of LGBTQ clergy. The decision would also determine whether or not to strike a rule that prohibited clergy from presiding over “homosexual unions.”
The room was uncharacteristically hushed as delegates logged their votes. They’d gathered to participate in a quadrennial General Conference, where an elected group of clergy and laypeople review and edit the rules and social stances of the church on a variety of subjects. When the results were announced, the room erupted in loud sobs and cheering. With this vote — and several others — over 50 years of church law, doctrine, and social stances aimed at restricting the full inclusion of LGBTQ methodists were reversed.
In a dramatic deviation from the staid (remarkably congressional) proceedings, the Methodists began to sing.
Church historian Ashley Boggan told Today, Explained’s Noel King that the UMC’s schism should matter to Methodists and non-Methodists alike. “If you look at Methodist history within the United States, it’s a great lens for looking at American history,” she said.
How did we get here?
For the last five years, the United Methodist Church has been fighting over its stance on LGBTQ members.
In a one-off special session in 2019, the UMC had voted to tighten its prohibitions on LGBTQ members — a decision that nearly half of all UMC congregations across the country went on to publicly reject in the following years. So, in 2022, a splinter denomination was born: the Global Methodist Church. Traditionalist congregations had seen the writing on the wall: Change was coming, and they didn’t want to be part of it.
Conservative churches began leaving the denomination in droves, and by the time the General Conference convened this year, a quarter of US congregations had jumped ship. It was this newly slimmed-down UMC that voted to reverse the church’s anti-LGBTQ positions earlier this month.
What Methodists say about America
The Methodist church developed in tandem with the United States. Both are 18th-century experiments in democracy, and each has weathered the great challenges of the last two centuries — war, reunion, and an ever-expanding understanding of personhood — in distinct but parallel lanes.
Throughout the 19th century, as the United States grappled with the notion of Black personhood and the reality of chattel slavery, so too did the Methodists. In 1844, 40 percent of Methodist congregations split off to form a pro-slavery splinter congregation.
That was the last time this many Methodists split off from the main denomination. Fifteen years later, the Confederacy seceded as well, and a bloody civil war shortly followed. This parallel has not gone unnoticed.
According to Boggan, in the decades that followed, this pattern repeated itself. As the post-war US reconstructed itself, the Methodist church followed suit. In a 1939 merger, the Southern and Northern Methodists were once again united. As states enacted Jim Crow laws across the country, the Methodists created a segregated system of their own.
The Methodist church became a sort of bellwether for larger national sentiment, and this extended beyond racial politics, The church granted full ordination rights to women in 1956, and seven years later, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique mainstreamed “the problem with no name.”
While this all might lead us to fear that the current breakup in the Methodist church is yet again a harbinger of violence, it is helpful to remember this caveat: the Civil War-era United States was extremely Methodist. According to church historian Nathan Hatch, in the runup to the Civil War, the Methodist church was “the most extensive national institution other than the Federal government.” The sheer size of the denomination meant that the political reality of the church would eventually become the political reality of the country.
Today, church membership is in decline, and the institutional influence of mainline protestant churches is much diminished (although to exactly what effect is debatable). The church is not, as it was in the 19th century, a small-scale model of the country. Today, according to Boggan, the church acts more like a lens: a way to see broader national tensions work themselves out on a smaller scale.
What next?
At the General Conference, several traditionalists told me that their local congregations were still actively considering leaving the denomination. Dixie Brewster, a conservative delegate from Kansas, told me she feels like the UMC is no longer a big-tent denomination, and “it seems like there’s no place at the table for the conservative view of traditional marriage and family.”
I’m not sure these anxieties are warranted. On paper, the church is an objectively bigger tent today than it was last year. Queer people can pursue ordination, and clergy now have the right to perform same-sex weddings.
Notably, a clear majority of delegates also voted to pass a statement that formally enshrined the rights of traditional clergy to refuse to officiate a same-sex marriage. In a 479–203 vote, the UMC decided that “all clergy have the right to exercise and preserve their conscience when requested to perform any marriage, union, or blessing of any couple.”
It appears that this now “more progressive” UMC is walking a sort of quasi-libertarian road toward progress. By “removing restrictions on paper,” Boggan said, the conversations about how best to love one’s neighbor must change venues. No longer enshrined in the black-and-white text of doctrine, debate is forced back inside the four walls of the church.
While the Methodist church was once a reliable indicator of national sentiment, it lifted its prohibition on gay marriage nearly a decade after Obergefell v. Hodges did the same for the rest of the country. This is not to say that LGBTQ rights in the United States are set in stone. In Florida, legislators have decided that while you can say gay, you have to say it carefully. Most Republican-run states have restricted or outright banned gender-affirming care for minors, and in states where restrictions on LGBTQ people have gotten tighter, reported hate crimes against LGBTQ elementary and high school students have quadrupled.
It is unclear whether or not the United Methodist Church will continue to embody these tensions. The mass exodus of conservative congregations was orchestrated by what Boggan called the “evangelical wing” of the UMC. The wing of the church most actively engaging in conservative culture wars has taken itself out of the conversation.
Whether the Methodists pull back together or splinter further is still an open question.
— While the Vatican never stated its objections to the Rev. Martin Lintner’s appointment, his writings on LGBTQ+ and queer issues were called into question.
Nearly a year after the Vatican blocked an Italian theologian’s candidacy to become the dean of an influential German and Italian academy due to his progressive writings on sexuality and gender, the Vatican finally approved of his appointment without comment, according to the theologian.
“The reasons why the decision was revised were not communicated,” said the Rev. Martin Lintner, in an email to RNS, adding that “the matter was clarified internally.”
“The important thing for me is that my publications are obviously not a stumbling block,” he said.
Bishop Ivo Muser of Bolzano-Bressanone, whose diocese includes the Philosophical-Theological College of Brixen/Bressanone, was notified of the Vatican’s approval shortly after Easter. Lintner is scheduled to begin his tenure as dean of the university on Sept. 1.
The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith denied Lintner’s appointment as dean at the school in the German-speaking region of northern Italy after the faculty elected him in November 2022.
Muser, who also oversees the university, took matters into his own hands after six months of silence from the Vatican about granting a nihil obstat, a church protocol whose Latin name means “nothing obstructs.” It is a necessary approval indicating that a theologian’s work does not constitute a breach with Catholic thought.
The nihil obstat is normally issued by the Vatican department for education, but the bishop was surprised to discover in January 2023 that the application had been halted by the Vatican’s Department for the Doctrine of the Faith, which ensures conformity with church teaching.
Lintner registered a complaint about a “lack of transparency,” given that the official reason for the denial was not communicated. “My bishop was told verbally by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith that my publications on questions of sexual morality would pose a problem,” Lintner said.
Lintner, of the Order of the Servants of Mary, or the Servites, has specialized in studies on animals and the environment, but also questions regarding sexuality and gender. He has called for reform of the church’s teaching on sexual morality, particularly regarding queer and transgender perspectives, saying that, instead of offering a list of “don’ts,” the church needs to engage with younger generations.
“I already had a conflict with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2012 after I published a book on sexual morality. These topics, and especially the theological and ethical discussion of gender studies, still seem to be difficult terrain,” Lintner said.
Lintner’s reflections might have been a red flag in some Vatican offices in themselves, but the denial of his appointment was also likely motivated by the Philosophical-Theological College of Brixen/Bressanone’s close relationship with the church in Germany, which is locked in a theological arm-wrestle with the Vatican over female inclusion in the church, outreach to LGBTQ+ faithful and lay leadership.
The church in Germany has recently concluded a set of discussions known as the Synodal Way, in which Catholic bishops and lay organizations considered challenges facing local churches. While bearing a similar name, it has no connection to Pope Francis’ Synod on Synodality, a multi-year process of dialogue and engagement with catholic churches and lay faithful all over the world.
The tensions between the Vatican and the Synodal Path became apparent when the German church began blessing same-sex couples despite a Vatican declaration banning the practice. The appointment of Lintner, who supports the blessing of same-sex couples and works closely with German moral theologians, likely raised some concerns within the Vatican walls.
In a written statement after the Vatican’s refusal in 2023, Lintner wrote that the decision questioned the Vatican’s commitment to synodality and its promise to promote dialogue, transparency and welcoming.
In a speech at the Pontifical Theological Academy in Rome in November, Francis told a group of theologians that the church needed to embrace “a brave cultural revolution” and let go of “abstractly rehashing formulas and patterns from the past.”
In his email, Lintner said, “I have the impression that not all Vatican departments are happy about it. The reform of the Curia is also not met with approval everywhere in the Vatican.” He said that he believed Francis’ reform efforts have resulted in some hopeful change.
The flap over Lintner’s appointment came as Francis has reordered the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, appointing as its head Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who in the past was denied a nihil obstat for his writings on sexuality and marriage. As a bishop, Francis helped him obtain the approval he needed from the Vatican, just as Muser lobbied for Lintner today.
Since his appointment in July 2023, Fernandez has issued decrees allowing for the blessing of same-sex couples under certain limitations and stating that trans faithful may be baptized and act as godparents. But he has also reinforced the church’s opposition to gender theory, surrogacy and sex-change operations.
For Lintner, criticizing Catholic teaching needs to take place with humility and fidelity to the church’s Magisterium, or traditional teaching. Opening up discussions in the field of theology is essential to the betterment of the church, he explained, while adding that as he prepares to take on his new role, he is looking forward to putting the past behind.
“When I criticize, it is in order to make a contribution to the further development of doctrine in constructive fidelity to tradition,” he said. “I am convinced that this has been recognized and positively appreciated in the educational dicastery.”
