Just a few weeks after a gay nightclub in Orlando became the site of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, and as numerous L.G.B.T.Q. Pride celebrations were winding down throughout the country on Sunday night, Pope Francis said that the gay community deserves an apology, as do all others who have historically felt discriminated against by the Catholic Church.
“I think the church must not only apologize . . . to a gay person it offended, but we must apologize to the poor, to women who have been exploited, to children forced into labor,” Francis told reporters aboard the papal plane Sunday, when asked whether he agreed with German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who said that the gay community deserves an apology from the church for having marginalized them. The church “has to ask for forgiveness for having blessed so many weapons,” the pontiff added, NPR reports.
“The church must say it is sorry for not having behaved as it should many times, many times—when I say ‘the church,’ I mean we Christians, because the church is holy, we are the sinners. We Christians must say we are sorry,” Francis added, before invoking his famous 2013 remark in solidarity, if not support, of the gay community: “who am I to judge?“
Compared to his predecessors, Pope Francis has taken a more liberal approach to Catholic traditions since he began his papal reign in March of 2013. While the he has stopped short of backing same-sex marriages, and the church still believes that homosexual acts are sinful, the pope has continually condemned violence against the gay community and has argued passionately for the dignity and acceptance of gay Catholics and other groups that have traditionally been shunned by the church, such as single parents and divorcees. Earlier this year, Francis also waded into U.S. politics when he leveled that Donald Trump was “not Christian,” based on the presumptive G.O.P. nominee’s plans to build a wall along the Mexican boarder. “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” he said.
