The Vatican note also pointed to a 2014 interview in which the pope had reiterated that “marriage is between a man and a woman” but that secular states could seek to “justify civil unions to regulate various situations of coexistence, driven by the demand to regulate economic aspects among people, such as ensuring health care.” Afineevsky cut.īut the Vatican note said that during the Televisa interview, in speaking of the controversy in Argentina, Francis had argued for the right of gay couples to have legal protections. Francis responded that it was “an incongruence to speak about gay marriage,” for the Catholic Church, a comment that Mr. In the Televisa interview, the correspondent Valentina Alazraki asked the pope whether his position on gay marriage had softened upon becoming pope. Argentina was the first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage. In its explanatory note, the Vatican said Francis’ comments on civil union referred to a position he had taken when he had been archbishop of Buenos Aires and had strongly opposed a 2010 law allowing same-sex marriage. The pope’s comments on civil unions had been cut from that interview, but it remains unclear under whose orders the snipping took place.
The director of the film, Evgeny Afineevsky, had told reporters that the pope had made the comments on civil unions directly to him, but it emerged soon after that the comments had apparently been made in a 2019 interview with the Mexican broadcaster Televisa. The note says that during a 2019 interview, the pope had answered two separate questions - asked at different moments - that in the documentary were “edited and published as a single answer without proper contextualization, which has led to confusion.” On Monday, a Vatican official confirmed its authenticity. The apostolic nuncio to Mexico, the Reverend Franco Coppola, published the unsigned note on his Facebook page on Saturday. Last week, acknowledging the “various reactions and interpretations” provoked by the pope’s apparent break from his predecessors, the Vatican Secretary of State sent an explanatory note to its nuncios, or ambassadors, to be shared with bishops, “with the desire to favor an appropriate understanding of the words of the Holy Father.” In the documentary, he reiterated his view that gay people are “children of God,” and said: “What we have to create is a civil union law. The pope’s remarks made headlines last month after they appeared in the documentary “Francesco,” at its Oct. ROME - The Vatican has confirmed the pope’s remarks on gay couples deserving civil protections as it sent an explanatory note to bishops underlining that Francis’s comments did not mark a change in church doctrine.