ROME — The once-venerable Lancet medical journal asserts Pope Francis has made an important contribution to global health through LGBTQ advocacy, openness to contraception, and environmental activism.
In its latest issue, the Lancet asks what difference the Francis papacy has made to global health. Instead of addressing his defense of persons with disabilities, his frequent meetings with healthcare specialists, or his support for medical personnel in impoverished countries, the journal underscores politically trendy topics involving sex and ecology.
Hailing Francis as “inclusive, progressive, a reformer, and even a ‘disruptor Pope,’” the Lancet focuses on three topics only tangentially related to major world health issues.
The pope “has been more welcoming to LGBTQ Catholics who have been marginalized, inviting prominent American LGBTQ Catholics to the Vatican,” the magazine contends.
Moreover, the pontiff has criticized anti-LGBTQ legislation in Uganda, insisting that “criminalizing people with homosexual tendencies is an injustice,” the Lancet states.
The Lancet fails to cite Francis in full, since what he said was: “Being homosexual is not a crime. It’s not a crime. Yes, it’s a sin. Well, yes, but let’s make the distinction first between sin and crime.”
File/Activists display banners calling for action against world poverty, climate change and other environmental issues as they arrive on St. Peter’s square prior to Pope Francis’s Sunday Angelus prayer on June 28, 2015 at the Vatican. (GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP/Getty Images)
In March 2021, the Vatican — with the pope’s express approval — officially ruled out the possibility of giving blessings to gay couples, on the grounds that God Himself “does not and cannot bless sin” so neither can the Church.
In the second place, the Lancet lauds the pope’s decision to “circumvent” questions about condom usage, opting instead to talk about family planning “within the context of responsible parenting,” asserting that Catholics need not breed “like rabbits.”
Some commentators have interpreted the Francis approach as “a softening of the Vatican’s stance on family planning and a potential window of opportunity for policy change,” the Lancet states, adding that there is “some indication that Pope Francis is steering towards a ‘one policy doesn’t fit all’ approach with respect to family planning to reflect the heterogenicity of the Catholic church.”
Finally, the pope has made an important contribution to “planetary health,” the journal argues, especially through his insistence on the urgent need to battle climate change.
In 2015, Francis became the first pope in history to devout an entire encyclical letter to the topic of the environment, which “spans interconnecting problems, including air pollution, migration, water, climate change, and biodiversity loss,” the Lancet declares.
“The exploitation of the planet has already exceeded acceptable limits,” the pope has asserted.
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