ROME: Pope Francis endorsed same-sex civil unions for the first time as pontiff while being interviewed for the feature-length documentary Francesco, which premiered on Wednesday at the Rome Film Festival.

The papal thumbs-up came midway through the film that delves into issues Pope Francis cares about most, including the environment, poverty, migration, racial and income inequality, and the people most affected by discrimination.

‘Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God,’ Pope Francis said in one of his sit-down interviews for the film. ‘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.’

While serving as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Pope Francis endorsed civil unions for gay couples as an alternative to same-sex marriages. However, he had never come out publicly in favour of civil unions as pope.

The Jesuit priest who has been at the forefront in seeking to build bridges with gays in the church, the Rev. James Martin, praised the pope’s comments as a major step forward in the church’s support for LGBT people.

“The Pope’s speaking positively about civil unions also sends a strong message to places where the church has opposed such laws,” Martin said in a statement.

Catholic Church teaching holds that gays must be treated with dignity and respect but that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. A 2003 document from the Vatican’s doctrine office stated that the church’s respect for gays cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behavior or to legal recognition of homosexual unions. That document was signed by the then-prefect of the office, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI and Francis predecessor.

One of the main characters in the documentary is Juan Carlos Cruz, the Chilean survivor of clergy sexual abuse whom Francis initially discredited during a 2018 visit to Chile.

Cruz, who is gay, said that during his first meetings with the pope in May 2018 after they patched things up, Francis assured him that God made Cruz gay. Cruz tells his own story in snippets throughout the film, chronicling both Pope Francis evolution on understanding sexual abuse as well as to document the pope’s views on gay people.

Director Evgeny Afineevsky had remarkable access to cardinals, the Vatican television archives and the pope himself. He said he negotiated his way in through persistence, and deliveries of Argentine mate tea and Alfajores cookies that he got to the pope via some well-connected Argentines in Rome.

Listen, when you are in the Vatican, the only way to achieve something is to break the rule and then to say, I’m sorry, Afineevsky said in an interview ahead of the premiere.

The director worked official and unofficial channels starting in early 2018, and ended up so close to Pope Francis by the end of the project that he showed the pope the movie on his iPad in August. The two recently exchanged Yom Kippur greetings; Afineevsky is a Russian-born Jew now based in Los Angeles. On Wednesday, Afineevsky’s 48th birthday, the director said Francis presented him with a birthday cake during a private meeting at the Vatican. But Francesco is more than a biopic about the pope.

Wim Wenders did that in the 2018 film Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Francesco, is more a visual survey of the worlds crises and tragedies, with audio from the pope providing possible ways to solve them.

Published in Dawn, October 22nd, 2020