By Eduardo J. Echeverria.

But first a note from Robert Royal: Professor Echeverria lays out today some of the corrections that Pope Leo needs to make on urgent matters that he inherited from Pope Francis. And the American pope just might make them. Just the other day, he asserted that marriage is not an ideal, but a concrete reality - and one that people can live. A good beginning. But we intend to follow up and encourage him to continue along similar lines. We can only do so with your help. We're making some progress, but we've still got a long way to go to assure that we'll be here for the rest of 2025, and beyond. Please, do your part in this essential work. Support The Catholic Thing, today.

Now for today's column...

In light of Pope Leo XIV's statement that the family is founded on the "stable union between a man and a woman," the responses of the critics and boosters of the late Pope Francis's view of conjugal marriage are striking. The former imply that Leo's view of conjugal marriage as the two-in-one flesh union of a man and a woman reaffirms what Francis had denied, and the latter defend the continuity between Francis and Leo on marriage.

On the one hand, the critics are wrong. Throughout his pontificate, Pope Francis consistently taught - even if his teaching was not in the limelight compared to his teaching on environmental issues - the conjugal view of marriage: marriage as the two-in-one-flesh union between a man and a woman. And sexual differentiation being the fundamental prerequisite for the two to become one flesh. Furthermore, St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis all affirmed the moral and sacramental significance of the two-in-one-flesh bodily unity as foundational to the marital form of love.

Pope Francis upheld the objectivity of God's "primordial divine plan" (see Genesis chapter 1, verse 27, chapter 2, verse 24) of the deepest reality of marriage, grounded in the order of creation. He, as well as Leo, insisted on marriage's ontological nature: "'Marriage' is a historical word. Forever, throughout humanity, and not only in the Church, it is between a man and a woman. You can't change it just like that. It's the nature of things." This teaching is reaffirmed in the Apostolic Exhortations, Evangelii gaudium and Amoris Laetitia, as well as in the encyclical Laudato Si'.

On the other hand, the boosters are wrong. Despite Francis's affirmation of conjugal marriage, there are five things that he contributed to undermining it, at least to the perception that he could not unequivocally support conjugal marriage.

First, Pope Francis was an advocate of legal support of same-sex civil unions. Doesn't the advocacy of such a union, which has sinful acts at its core constituting the union, corrupt the good of human nature and hence the culture of marriage?

Second, he affirmed that "homosexuals experience the gift of love," implying thereby that homosexual "love" is not an inherently disordered form of love, an offense against chastity. Did he think that the homosexual is able to live the vocation to chastity, and hence, of love in a same-sex relationship? How could the homosexual do so? The vocation of chastity involves sexual differentiation between a man and a woman, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which, according to Christian anthropology, means "the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being."

Third, he allowed the controverted practice of same-sex blessings, legitimized in the "Declaration" Fiducia Supplicans. This declaration died the death of a thousand qualifications: from the blessing of a union, to a couple, and, finally, to an individual (see Pope Francis on "60 Minutes"). Regardless, as John Finnis correctly notes, "there is no crucial moral or pastoral difference between. A, blessing people who happen to be sinners, and (b) blessing people as parties to a relationship expressed in sinful acts."

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