Pope Francis to Answer Questions on Gender, Sexuality, Abortion in New Documentary
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Disney will release a new documentary on April 5 in which Pope Francis answers some of today’s predominant social questions on gender, sexuality, and abortion posed by ten young people.
As he enters the second decade of his papacy, Francis has been confronted with challenges from conservative and liberal corners of the Church. He angered Latin Mass traditionalists in recent years by placing restrictions on the pre-Vatican II liturgy. There has also been pressure on Francis to clarify the Catholic Church’s position on sexuality in the face of recent efforts by the German bishops to bless gay relationships.
“Do you know what a non-binary person is?,” asks one young woman in the documentary’s trailer. “If I weren’t a feminist, would being a Christian be better?,” asks another.
“The subject of pederasty in the Church?” asks one young man. Another says to Francis, “I get the impression, from what I see around me, that people are very disappointed with the Church, not with God.”
“Does all this bring about a contradiction in you?,” Pope Francis is asked, to which he later replies: “Consistency is what we Christians find the hardest.”
The Spanish-language documentary which will be released on Hulu in the U.S. is shot by two Spanish documentarians, Jordi Évole and Marius Sanchez, who lean left, the Catholic News Agency reported. Producciones del Barrio, Évole’s production company, is known for documentaries such as Mr. Trump, Pardon the Interruption, investigating the impact of Trump’s border policies on Hispanic communities. Évole has been criticized in the past for criticism and satiric humor directed at the Catholic Church.
The pope has been viewed as a reformer in many parts of the media for his fresh reformulations of the Church’s position on difficult social issues, culminating in his “who am I to judge?” statement on homosexuality.
In a 2019 interview on Évole’s Salvados, a TV show, Francis clarified the Church’s position that homosexual “tendencies are not sin … sin is acting, of thought, word, and deed, with freedom.”
Abortion also promises to be a central topic of the documentary. “Abortion exists. What do we do with these women, in the Church, as an institution?,” asks one young woman. “I’ve never met anyone who’s repented and said at the door of the abortion clinic: ‘I’m going to give this life a chance,'” says another.
However, on this subject, Francis has always been clear that eliminating a life is never the answer.
