“Homosexual people 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.” —Pope Francis, speaking in a just-released (2020) documentary film, shown in Rome today, October 21. (Here is an AP article about the film and the Pope’s remarks in it.)
The Pope’s remarks, made public today — and coming in the midst of political elections in the United States, though the release of the film may not have been intended to influence the US elections — were widely taken to indicate a clear support for civil laws sanctioning the relationships homosexual couples, something Church leaders have always taught in the past is not in keeping with the Catholic moral teaching that marriage is, by its very nature, only between one man and one woman.
(See, for example, this document issued by the Holy See on June 3, 2003, written under the direction of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. The final paragraph says, quite clearly: