Religion

ROME – A letter sent from the Vatican to bishops’ conferences around the world seeking to explain the Pope Francis’s recent remarks on civil unions has argued that the pope’s words taken out of context and that his position does not constitute a change in Church teaching on the issue.

Released in late October, the documentary “Francesco” by Russian filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky includes a 20-second clip of the pope saying homosexual individuals “have the right to be in a family. They are children of God.”
“You can’t kick someone out of a family, nor make their life miserable for this. What we have to have is a civil union law; that way they are legally covered,” the pope says in the clip.

However, after his apparent backing of civil unions exploded in international media, doubt began to arise over the origins of the interview during which those comments were made.
In a fiasco that has since been dubbed “Moviegate,” it was established that the pope’s remarks were not made in a new interview given to Afineevsky for the documentary, as Afineevsky claimed, but that they actually came from a 2019 interview with Mexican journalist Valentina Alazraki...

...The letter goes on to provide background on the incident, saying that over a year ago Pope Francis was asked during an interview “two different questions at two different times that, in the aforementioned documentary, were edited and published as a single answer without the proper contextualization, which has generated confusion.”

...Pointing to the pope’s assertion in the film that “Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family. They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it,” the letter said this statement was a reference “to the pastoral need that, within the family, a son or daughter with a homosexual orientation should never be discriminated against.”
A reference was then made to paragraph 250 of Francis’s 2016 post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia, which states that “every person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration, while ‘every sign of unjust discrimination’ is to be carefully avoided, particularly any form of aggression and violence.”
Families whose members include individuals with same-sex attraction, the paragraph continues, “should be given respectful pastoral guidance, so that those who manifest a homosexual orientation can receive the assistance they need to understand and fully carry out God’s will in their lives.”
The letter then went on to explain that the pope’s remarks about civil cohabitation were made in response to a separate question about “a ten-year-old local law in Argentina on ‘marriage equality of same-sex couples’ and his opposition to them as the then-Archbishop of Buenos Aires in this regard.”