Vatican clarifies pope’s gay marriage stance taken out of context

The Vatican has after nearly two weeks broken its silence on Pope Francis’s comments about same-sex civil union approval, saying his comments were taken out of context.

In the documentary released Oct. 21 that originally sparked the global confusion on his stance, the pope talks about civil unions for gay couples, which is something he has publicly supported since 2010 when he was the archbishop of Buenos Aires, though he was also strongly opposed to same-sex marriage.

The Vatican shared guidance on the issue to ambassadors, who then shared the information.

“More than a year ago, during an interview, Pope Francis answered two different questions at two different times that, in the aforementioned documentary, were edited and published as a single answer without proper contextualization, which has led to confusion,” Archbishop Franco Coppola said in a Facebook post Sunday.

The Vatican said Francis was referring to his 2010 position on the issue when he was archbishop.

The documentary appeared to suggest that Francis made the comments to director Evgeny Afineevsky in a new interview, which was later revealed to have been from the 2019 conversation.