Pope Leo XIV on Same-Sex Blessings: 'All Are Welcome' — Just Not Formally Blessed

Pope Leo XIV held a press conference aboard the papal plane on Thursday, April 23, as he flew back to Rome after wrapping a seven-day trip through Africa that ended with an open-air Mass in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. Popes routinely use the in-flight press session to speak more loosely than they do in prepared remarks, and journalists routinely use it to ask the questions the Vatican’s communications office would rather not answer directly. LGBTQ+ blessings was one of those questions.

The pope’s answer was, by Leo XIV’s standards, both characteristic and carefully calibrated. “All are invited to follow Jesus, and all are invited to look for conversion in their lives,” he said, echoing Pope Francis’ “todos, todos, todos” — everyone, everyone, everyone. Then, on formalized blessings of same-sex couples specifically: “I think that the topic can cause more disunity than unity, and that we should look for ways to build our unity on Jesus Christ and what Jesus Christ teaches.”

Read in the best light, it is a pastoral shrug — an acknowledgement that no one is being turned away at the church door, paired with an unwillingness to do the one thing many queer Catholics have actively been asking the Holy See to permit. Read in the worst light, it confirms what Leo has already been telegraphing since his election last May: the Francis-era experiment with ad-hoc blessings is being quietly walled off.

What Leo actually said

Journalists pressed the pope specifically on Fiducia Supplicans — the December 2023 declaration from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith that authorized priests to offer brief, spontaneous, non-liturgical blessings to same-sex couples, as long as those blessings did not resemble a wedding ceremony or imply the Church was blessing the relationship itself. The declaration split the global Catholic hierarchy almost immediately. Several African and Eastern European bishops’ conferences said they would not apply it. German bishops, on the other end, moved in the opposite direction and began authorizing more formal blessings than the declaration itself permitted.

Leo’s answer addressed both tails. He reaffirmed Fiducia Supplicans as issued — meaning brief, informal blessings remain technically permitted. But he went out of his way to say the Holy See “does not approve” of the formalized blessing rites being used by parts of the German Church. “We have been clear with the German bishops,” he said, “that there are limits beyond what was specifically, if you will, allowed for by Pope Francis.”

On whether the broader Catholic teaching on sexuality and marriage might shift, Leo was firmer: “It seems to me very unlikely, at least in the near future, that the doctrine of the Church will change its teachings on sexuality and marriage.” He had said essentially the same thing in February, but to hear it restated on the plane, unprompted, is not a casual thing. Papal off-the-cuff remarks become canonical reference points within weeks.

The pope also made an unprompted argument that “the unity or division of the Church should not revolve around sexual matters” — that questions of justice, equality, religious freedom, and women’s rights “would all take priority before that particular issue.” That is a rhetorical maneuver with a long history in Catholic discourse: frame LGBTQ+ concerns as narrow and sectarian in order to avoid engaging with them on their own terms.

Reading the room

Leo XIV — born Robert Prevost in Chicago, a former Augustinian prior general, the first American pope — was elected in May 2025 on a compromise ballot. The conclave that chose him did not want another Francis, who had spent twelve years antagonizing the Vatican’s conservative wing on everything from liturgy to economics to the death penalty. It also did not want a reactionary retrenchment that would turn the Church against itself in public.

Leo has spent the first year of his pontificate trying to thread that needle. He has met privately with prominent LGBTQ+-affirming Catholics — including Fr. James Martin of Outreach — and described those meetings as exchanges in which he expressed “openness and welcome.” At the same time, he has issued firm public statements that doctrine isn’t changing. He has publicly reprimanded Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich for authorizing the more elaborate German blessings. He has also declined to discipline any of the African bishops’ conferences that flat-out refused to implement Fiducia Supplicans.

The pattern, after a year, is legible: welcome at the parish door, no movement at the doctrinal level, and no appetite for the kind of public confrontation with conservative national churches that defined Francis’ last years.

What LGBTQ+ Catholics are saying

New Ways Ministry and DignityUSA, the two largest LGBTQ+-affirming Catholic organizations in the United States, both released measured statements on Thursday. Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, thanked the pope for “reaffirming that all people are welcome” but noted that “welcome without equality is not reconciliation.” Marianne Duddy-Burke at DignityUSA was blunter: “Being told we are welcome in a church that will not bless our unions, ordain our spouses’ children, or affirm our marriages is a very limited kind of welcome.”

European voices have been sharper. GAY45, the pan-European queer magazine, observed that Leo’s “disunity” framing is “the language of a pope who wants the LGBTQ+ conversation to go away, not to advance.” In the Balkans — where most Catholic hierarchies still treat Fiducia Supplicans as a theoretical document — local queer Catholics we have spoken to describe the plane remarks as a small but real permission slip for conservative bishops to continue doing nothing.

What it means, practically

For rank-and-file LGBTQ+ Catholics, very little changes today. A priest who was willing to quietly bless a couple under Fiducia Supplicans last week is still permitted to do so this week. A bishops’ conference that refused to implement the declaration still refuses. A German parish that was performing something close to a full blessing liturgy is now more clearly being told — from the pope’s own mouth — that it shouldn’t.

For the longer arc, the Leo-era signal is becoming unmistakable: the Church is not going to walk backward on Fiducia Supplicans, and it is not going to walk forward past it. The policy is the policy. Doctrine on marriage and sexuality is not being reopened. Welcome is available. Formal equality is not. That is the settlement Leo is offering.

Whether it holds — whether queer Catholics, especially in Germany, Belgium, and parts of the US, accept a pastoral olive branch without formal recognition — is the real open question. Twelve years of Francis taught many LGBTQ+ Catholics to hope for more than welcome. A year of Leo is teaching them to plan for less.

Our instinct, writing from a country where the Catholic Church is a small presence and the Orthodox Church runs the religious conversation: the people who most need Rome to speak clearly on dignity and welcome are queer Catholics in places where their local hierarchy would happily criminalize them tomorrow. For them, “all are welcome” — said carefully, from a plane, in English, to European journalists — is better than silence. It is also not nearly enough.

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Sources: America Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, OSV News.