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Pope Francis June 25, 2016GYG Studio / Shutterstock.com

ROME, October 21, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – In perfect time to affect the U.S. presidential election, a new film will premier in North America on Sunday that represents in dramatic fashion Pope Francis’s attack on President Trump as “not a Christian” for the President’s building of the border wall. In the documentary, which premiered in Rome today, Pope Francis has made his most clear statements contradicting Catholic Church teaching by calling for homosexual civil unions to be legalized. Speaking of homosexual civil unions, he said “What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered. I stood up for that.”

The film Francesco is a fawning and dramatic treatment of Pope Francis, painting the pontiff as a liberator of humanity pushing on many of the hot-button issues dear to the Democrat left.

It is not the first time Pope Francis has contravened Church teaching in the matter of homosexuality, but it is one of his clearest statements contravening established Church teaching. In 2003, in a document by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) and approved and ordered published by Pope St. John Paul II, the Church issued specific guidance on the need to reject homosexual civil union proposals. The document called “Considerations regarding proposals to give legal recognition to unions between homosexual persons,” states that “all Catholics are obliged to oppose the legal recognition of homosexual unions.”

The Catholic Church teaches, moreover, that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and that respect for homosexuals “cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions.”

Catholic News Agency reported that the film includes the “story of the pontiff encouraging two Italian men in a same-sex relationship to raise their children in their parish church.” Speaking of his pastoral approach in an interview with filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky, the Pope said, “Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family. They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it.”

LifeSite has contacted the Vatican Press Office and several Cardinals for comment but has not yet received responses.

While some may be surprised to see Pope Francis advocating for homosexual civil unions when such a position contradicts perennial Church teaching, the Pope’s move comes as no surprise to those who have closely followed him on this issue:

  • Pope Francis has promoted the notoriously pro-homosexual Jesuit Fr. James Martin – who was made a Vatican consultant during this pontificate and a speaker at the World Meeting of Families in Ireland and met with him personally in an audience. Fr. Martin has stated that Pope Francis has gone out of his way to appoint “gay-friendly” bishops and cardinals in the Catholic Church.
  • In July 2018, Pope Francis sent a three-page letter “blessing” and endorsing a Catholic ethics conference co-organized by Jesuit Father James Keenan, a public promoter of same-sex “marriage.” The conference featured many feminist and pro-LGBT speakers.
  • In March 2018, a French priest announced in a televised interview that Pope Francis approved of his blessing of homosexual couples.
  • In February, one of the Pope’s top nine advisor cardinals suggested that spiritual encouragement of homosexual couples should be undertaken and blessings for homosexual couples should not be ruled out.
  • In a book-length interview in September 2017, Pope Francis signaled support for legal recognition of same-sex civil unions. “Let us call things by their names,” he said. “Matrimony is between a man and a woman. This is the precise term. Let us call the same-sex union a ‘civil union.’”
  • On October 2, 2016, Pope Francis referred to a woman who underwent a sex-change operation as a “man.” He referred to her as having “married” another woman and admitted to inviting them to and receiving them at the Vatican in 2015, describing the couple as “happy.” Clarifying his use of pronouns, the pope said, “He that was her but is he.”
  • Despite the avalanche of evidence of harm to the Church from the Pope’s “who am I to judge” remark on his first plane interview in 2013, he repeated the line in June 2016 while misrepresenting the Catechism on homosexuality.
  • In 2014, Pope Francis appointed Bishop Blase Cupich as Archbishop of Chicago despite his reputation for telling priests not to join 40 Days for Life. After he demonstrated his dissent from Catholic teaching on homosexuality, saying homosexual couples should be given Holy Communion, Cupich was, nevertheless, named a cardinal.
  • When the United States nuncio had pro-family hero Kim Davis meet with Pope Francis at the nunciature during his USA papal visit, Davis was refused permission to take photos of the meeting. When the media asked the Vatican about the meeting they first refused to confirm it, and after some time said that “the only real audience granted by the Pope at the nunciature (embassy) was with one of his former students and his family.” The Pope’s former student, Yayo Grassi, was there with his sister, mother, and his homosexual partner. They took not only photos but also video in which Pope Francis can be seen embracing Grassi and his homosexual partner.
  • In May 2014, Pope Francis concelebrated Mass with and kissed the hand of a leading homosexual activist priest campaigning for changes in the Church’s teaching on homosexuality.
  • Cardinal Godfried Danneels, the archbishop emeritus of Brussels, was a personal appointment by Pope Francis to the Synods of Bishops on the family in 2014 and 2015. In addition to wearing rainbow liturgical vestments and being caught on tape concealing clergy homosexual sex abuse, Danneels said in 2013 of the passage of gay “marriage”: “I think it’s a positive development that states are free to open up civil marriage for gays if they want.”

In a now-famous 2016 in-flight press conference, Pope Francis showed his willingness to engage in political interference in the U.S. electoral process by commenting during the Presidential primaries that Trump was “not a Christian” because he was for building the border wall. In that same in-flight press conference in 2016, the Pope was asked to comment on same-sex union legislation going on in Italy, to which he replied, “The Pope doesn’t get mixed up in Italian politics … the pope is for everybody and he can’t insert himself in the specific internal politics of a country.”

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John-Henry is the co-founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of LifeSiteNews.com. He and his wife Dianne have eight children and they live in the Ottawa Valley in Ontario, Canada.

He has spoken at conferences and retreats, and appeared on radio and television throughout the world. John-Henry founded the Rome Life Forum, an annual strategy meeting for life, faith and family leaders worldwide. He is a board member of the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family. He is a consultant to Canada’s largest pro-life organization Campaign Life Coalition, and serves on the executive of the Ontario branch of the organization. He has run three times for political office in the province of Ontario representing the Family Coalition Party.

John-Henry earned an MA from the University of Toronto in School and Child Clinical Psychology and an Honours BA from York University in Psychology.