A passage devoted to the pontiff's reflections on same-sex unions and transgender people has been censored in Pope Francis's autobiography, published by Alpina.
Moscow bookstore Primus Versus shared photos of the book's pages with blacked-out passages in its announcement.
The autobiography's description says that it recounts Francis's life “from his family of Italian immigrants and his childhood in multicultural Buenos Aires to his election as pope and leadership of the Church.”
Theologian Natallia Vasilevich compared the published Russian text with the original and posted the censored passage on her Telegram channel. It discusses the declaration in which the pope wrote about blessing same-sex couples, as well as his meetings with transgender people.
Theologian Natallia Vasilevich wrote:
Openness to understanding—not relativism or any change in doctrine—is the spirit and essence of Fiducia supplicans, the declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on the blessing of couples in irregular situations, which I signed in December 2023. People are blessed, not relationships. This stems from a desire not to reduce the entire lives of those seeking enlightenment and guidance through a blessing to a single situation or condition.
Everyone is welcome in the Church, including divorced people, homosexual people, and transgender people. When a group of transgender people first came to the Vatican, they left in tears, moved that I had taken them by the hands and kissed them… As though I had done something extraordinary for them. But they are daughters of God!
They may be baptized under the same conditions as other believers, may serve as godparents under the same conditions as everyone else, and may also act as witnesses at weddings. No provision of canon law prohibits this.
In more than sixty countries around the world, homosexual and transgender people are considered criminals; in about a dozen countries, this is punishable by death, and executions are sometimes actually carried out. But homosexuality is not a crime; it is a human reality, and the Church and Christians cannot remain indifferent in the face of this criminal injustice or respond to it half-heartedly.
They are not “children of some lesser god”; God the Father loves them with the same unconditional love. He loves them as they are and accompanies them just as He accompanies each of us: remaining close and showing mercy and tenderness.
If If the Lord says “everyone,” then who am I to exclude anyone? “Tell me whom you exclude, and I will tell you who you are,” Don Luigi Di Liegro, founder of the Rome branch of Caritas, liked to say. He himself was the son of a migrant who had come to South America in search of work and had repeatedly been turned away.
Throughout my pastoral life, I have always welcomed and accompanied these brothers and sisters just as I have everyone else. And if anyone has personally experienced “rejection by the Church,” I would like them to know: it was rejection by one person in the Church, because the Church is a mother who calls and gathers all her children together.
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