Pope Francis’s declaration of support for a civil union for same-sex partners is both confusing and troubling. Confusing because no one is exactly sure of what the Pope means. Troubling because the world heard about this view in its present version through a documentary. We expect the Pope to speak to us on such a weighty issue directly with full explanation of how consistent his position is with Tradition, Scripture, and the constant teaching of the Magisterium. Hopefully, the Vatican will come up with a clarification, but for now, I will reflect on the text we have before us from the interview and its implications for the Church’s teaching on this subject particularly for African Catholics.
My prayer is that in the future, where the Pope’s position touches on such a contentious issue as same-sex
relations, that the Holy Father adopts the same pastoral discernment that he proposes in Amoris Laetitia.
Such a discernment could be done, for instance, by sharing his views internally with his college of cardinals, moral theologians, pastors on the pastoral frontline, or even through an inter-disciplinary commission. In this way, his thoughts will be refined, grounded, and purified through an ecclesial process. As it stands now, we theologians and Catholic leaders are now left with trying to explain what the Pope meant and how to reconcile his position with the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the sacrament of Holy Matrimony.
If I were to advice Pope Francis—and who am I to do so—I would recommend that he concentrates on his core message of a poor and merciful Church, and climate change both of which have been universally accepted in the Church and beyond. Second, that he should continue to pursue his program of curial reform, and missionary conversion through a culture of encounter, and dialogue through a synodal process— walking together as One Church. This process is more useful for engaging the whole Church in journeying together in facing the complex doctrinal, moral, and social challenges facing us all. When the Pope makes his personal views known on such a matter as same-sex marriage, he is walking alone or walking with a few of his flock who might support him; but his primatial function is to walk with the whole Church and
carry everyone along in the boat of Peter.
Furthermore, the Pope is not a civil leader and should allow local politicians in dialogue with the electorate to decide how best to protect the rights of same-sex persons in their respective countries and cultures. Our Church must respect the separation of Church and state on this matter. It is, in my humble opinion, the Pope’s duty to teach the whole Catholic faith and moral traditions clearly and firmly without alteration or adulteration. He is not an umpire on civil rights union for same-sex persons for nations—an issue which in
each of those countries that have legislated on it has ended in divisive polemics, legal and judicial gay activism, and political grandstanding. This knee-jerk approach to granting rights to civil union to gays and lesbians, from my experience of researching about equity and inclusion in Catholic schools in Ontario, Canada, and working with gay and lesbian students and Catholic teachers, has not helped to create an inclusive church or society. These rights have not led to a change of many minds nor has it significantly brought about a more accepting culture for gays and lesbians.
As Hans urs von Balthasar so clearly articulates, “Catholics alone possess the advantage of having a true reference point, a center of ecclesiastical unity, willed by Christ himself. If we destroy it, we not only destroy the Church, but we also deprive ecumenism of its only chance for success. This, of course, does not imply that one should elevate the pope above the Church or Christ.” Viewed in this light, we affirm that the Pope sits on the Chair of Peter as the center of unity and the guarantor of the truths of faith and morals for us Catholics on weighty matters like marriage and family life. Thus, Catholics would love to see the Pope engage in patient dialogue with the whole Catholic community, in order to find the path towards addressing and meeting the challenges and pains of same-sex persons, who are crying for inclusion. We do not want the Pope to travel alone on this matter.
I also wonder why Pope Francis did not bring up his support for civil union during the Synod on the family so that the whole Catholic family would have looked at it in a synodal manner which is Pope Francis’s preferred method and process for dealing with contentious issues in the Church. When a Pope goes public with a view like this one that is divisive and polarizing, he makes it harder for some Catholics to accept
him as a teacher of the faith and morals of the Catholic Church for all of the Catholic faithful.
Indeed, Pope Francis’s opinion contradicts the definitive judgement of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and confuses theologians like me, pastors and every Catholics who are now struggling with the discombobulating reality of two contradicting magisterial statements even if some might say that Pope Francis was not speaking ex cathedra in this documentary. The words of our Pope carry a lot of weight and should not be uttered in this manner and in this kind of setting.
In its 2003 document, Considerations regarding the proposals to give legal recognition to union between homosexual persons, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of faith gives the following judgement. First, this document recognizes that there are many existing and contentious practices in many countries in the world today with regard to persons with homosexual orientation in these words, “faced with the fact of
homosexual unions, civil authorities adopt different positions. At times they simply tolerate the phenomenon; at other times they advocate legal recognition of such unions, under the pretext of avoiding, with regard to certain rights, discrimination against persons who live with someone of the same sex. In other cases, they favor giving homosexual unions legal equivalence to marriage properly so-called, along
with the legal possibility of adopting children.”
What should Christians do when faced with these choices? The Holy Office goes ahead to state in unequivocal terms the need “to distinguish carefully the various aspects of the problem.” Christians have a duty of conscience in every occasion to give witness to the whole moral truth and affirm that even a legal
approval of homosexual acts by a state is not an adequate response to “unjust discrimination against homosexual persons.”
The document is actually challenging the claim that not legalizing civil union translates to an act of discrimination. The document, therefore, counsels Christians, that “prudent actions can be effective; these might involve: unmasking the way in which such tolerance (of civil unions in an uncritical manner) might be exploited or used in the service of ideology; stating clearly the immoral nature of these unions; reminding the government of the need to contain the phenomenon within certain limits so as to safeguard public morality and, above all, to avoid exposing young people to erroneous ideas about sexuality and marriage.”
The Congregation then makes this important conclusion: “Those who would move from tolerance to the
legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that the approval
or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil. In those situations where
homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging
to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation
in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation
on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.”
Thus, when Pope Francis says in this interview, “What we have to create is a civil union. In this way they
will be legally covered. I have defended this”; he confuses and troubles the conscience of most Catholics
and other Christians who look up to the Catholic Church.
One may not like some of the language of this statement. I would have loved to see a more inviting and less
judgmental language addressed to the homosexual persons and the proponents of civil union or same-sex
marriage in the Church to encourage dialogue and accompaniment. Despite my concern about the language
used here, I am convinced that the document clearly captures the teaching of our faith and morals which can be built upon. This clear teaching should not be contradicted by any faithful Catholic even if that person is a pope, bishop, priest, nun, politician or theologian.
There is a further problem for us African theologians and Church leaders. Those of us from Africa who wish to see an inclusive Church will find it hard to dialogue with our people (African Christians, Muslims, adherents of African Traditional Religions, Orthodox Christians and Hindus) who are not only strongly opposed to same-sex marriage, but in most instances do not wish to talk about it. The impression is now
given that our leader has already taken a position before the discussion has barely started in Africa. We are now being told by the Pope through a documentary what he prefers to see happen.
It must be stated and clearly too that we Africans have different narratives and traditions on marriage that have barely been tried by the Universal Church. Even though there might be some limitations with regard to generalizing about Africa here, but I must affirm that I have not seen an issue that has enjoyed a greater unanimity in Africa across different religious, ethnic, and political divides as the opposition to Western approach to same-sex orientation.
As a theologian, I listen to my African brothers and sisters. We must listen to our people and be with them where they are because that is how in their present circumstances and level of meaning they understand, embrace, and celebrate God’s revelation of what marriage and family life means. To do otherwise is to miss the footprints of God in Africa and to create a rupture in the world of meaning, and plausibility structure in the exuberant momentum of Christian expansion in Africa. This could hurt their faith, and create a cycle of
decay in their family lives and sense of community, and ancestral bonds.
As a Consultant to the Theological Commission of the Symposium of the Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), and one of the drafters of Africa’s response to the Instrumentum Laboris of the 2015 Synod of the family, I saw how African bishops were solicitous for a Church document that clearly rejects any discrimination and violence against same-sex persons. This was clearly stated in Africa’s document at the Synod. African bishops represented by Cardinal Napier of South Africa rejected the attempt
to tag Africa’s opposition to same-sex marriage or civil unions during the synod as conservative or homophobic. African clerics like Napier wanted to push forward the approach of indaba adopted in 2008 by the Anglican Communion in Cape Town, South Africa.
This indaba approach proposes that in a contentious issue in the Church, the leader of the Church, or a section of the Church should not try to impose their opinions or value preference on others, but rather in such a situation, the Church through her leadership should suspend judgement, and engage in more dialogue in the search for a consensus that will heal the wounded, and bring the community together in collective action for advancing the good.
It is also important that we recognize the asymmetries of power in the same-sex activism creeping into the
papacy and a section of the Church. This is found in the ways that a version of Western modernism represented in a specific approach to same-sex inclusion is being force-fed to other non-Western peoples in the Global South, who are developing their own response in a different way. As Church historian, Massimo Fagiolo, rightly observed, Francis’ pontificate since the beginning, can be broadly defined as one that is governed by the principle of “giving every faithful a say in what happens in the Church” or, in the Latin of the first millennium Roman law, Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus tractari debet (“What touches all must be approved by all”). This principle is actually what the African Indaba seeks to accomplish—listening to all
voices. However, when Cardinal Napier pushed hard for a greater dialogue and consensus on this matter in the Synod halls in 2015, he received a push back from some quarters within the Vatican leading to Cardinal Walter Kasper going public with a rebuke against African bishops in an interview where he said “Africans cannot tell us too much what we have to do.”
Now we have a papacy appearing to double-speak and teaching the rest of the world and Catholic faithful a very confusing and troubling opinion on same-sex civil union because the Church has failed to listen to Africa on this matter on marriage and reduced the African position to conservatism or homophobic intolerance.
However, most African ethnic groups move away from binary thinking and dualism when it comes to marriage and family life. There are no two ways of marrying—one heterosexual, another homosexual.
Those who cannot marry and are single are integrated in the family as mothers and fathers of their nieces and nephews, and are parents of other children in the family and in the clans. They are called papa and mama. No one is really single or alone in many settings in Africa, because each person is tabernacled in the extended family. This view was clearly presented by the African bishops during the synod on the family in 2015. This position has also been analyzed by African theologians in a book I edited titled Amoris Laetitia,
Love, Joy, and Sex: African Conversation on Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia and the Gospel of Family in
a Divided World (2019).
It needs to be noted from experience of history, that this approach of imposing one model (usually from the West) on the rest of the world and particularly on Africa did not create any ecclesial or social irenicism in the Anglican Church with regard to same-sex relations, but rather created an unbridgeable rift in the Anglican Communion. This confusing approach of civil union (yes), matrimonial bond (no) for same sex people will not work in African Catholicism. Besides, a civil union is not what same-sex persons in Africa are asking for in Africa. In Africa, we are dealing with bigger and more pressing problems. This, however, does not mean that there are no homosexual persons in Africa, but we are taking care of our own within the expansive capacious tent of African family bonds and relations.
The Church in Africa believes that greater dialogue is needed on this matter. It is committed to being a listening Church. What I heard from my fellow African theologians, priests and bishops during the 2019 Pan-African Catholic Congress on Theology is a genuine attempt by all in the continent to listen to the stories of same-sex persons in order to understand their pains and enrich the ecclesial and communal
appreciation of the complexities of the mystery of human sexuality.
In Africa, the story, as Chinua Achebe proposes, is our escort into the future, this is why this is a time to listen to the stories of same-sex persons even with greater interest, and the stories of many people suffering in our continent from this pandemic and the painful reality of Africa’s romance with Western modernity.
Humanity needs to enter with courage, humility, and patience into this complex mystery that is before us.
I think that the Church and entire humanity should make more effort at understanding this mystery. Rather, we are rushing into making laws and statements which have not helped to understand the reality, fears, hopes, struggles, and confusion of our homosexual brothers, sisters, neighbors, friends and colleagues. Let me be clear though, what God is telling us as a Church and people through the pains and confusion of some of our same-sex brothers and sisters all over the world has just become so unclear through this confusing papal interview.
Stan Chu Ilo is a Catholic priest of Awgu Diocese in South-Eastern Nigeria, and a research professor of World
Christianity and African Studies at the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology, DePaul University,
Chicago, U.S.A; and Honorary Professor of Theology and Religion, at Durham University, Durham, England. His latest book is titled, Someone Beautiful to God: Finding the Light of Faith in a Wounded World
