'Who am I to judge?': Pope Francis' legacy

When Pope Francis uttered five simple words —“Who am I to judge?”— in 2013, he launched a quiet revolution. He was responding to a reporter’s question about a “gay lobby” in the Catholic Church. But his answer reverberated far beyond that particular issue. It marked a bold departure from the Church’s long history of doctrinal judgments, especially around issues of sexuality, gender and identity.

It was a moment that stirred discomfort and hope in equal measure.

For me—a practicing Catholic, a gay man and someone who has devoted his professional life to helping people navigate conflict—it also revealed something profound about Pope Francis’ legacy: his embrace of conflict resilience.

In the current moment, and historically, the Catholic Church has rarely shied away from offering judgement on moral matters. And to be clear, there is scriptural support for this. Indeed, Jesus’ own words to the first pope, Peter, were explicit: “Whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on Earth shall be loosed in heaven.” The Church has long interpreted this verse as giving the Holy Father, in concert with the bishops, the authority to make pronouncements on right and wrong, sin and grace, doctrine and heresy. It’s a power that has been at the core of the Church's great unifying councils and most scandalous schisms.

So when Pope Francis seemed to shrug off a centuries-old posture of judgment in favor of humility, curiosity and accompaniment, it shook foundations for some. It also opened space for something deeply needed in our polarized age: the ability to engage disagreement not as a threat, but as a path to growth.

Conflict resilience is the capacity to sit with the discomfort of our disagreements — to stay in relationship when it’s hard, to remain curious when we feel threatened, and to build connection across difference without demanding conformity or unprincipled compromise.

Pope Francis may not have used this precise language, but he often modeled it better than almost any leader of our time, a remarkable feat for anyone, let alone one for the leader of an organization as hierarchical as the Catholic Church. The synodal process that Pope Francis launched put the institution of the Church on a path of embracing conflict and difference as a way to understand the promptings of the Holy Spirit in our time.

Again and again, Francis welcomed tension rather than silencing it. At the Synod on the Family and Synodality, he encouraged bishops to speak freely—even if that meant disagreement. He invited laypeople, including women and LGBTQ+ Catholics, to participate in discernment. He insisted that the Church not be a “museum for saints,” but a “field hospital for the wounded.”

The image of a field hospital captures his vision. It assumes pain, messiness and imperfection. It centers accompaniment over adjudication. And it makes space for questions that don’t have easy or cookie-cutter answers available in a catechism of rules and regulations. That’s not the same as abandoning doctrine. Rather, it’s about recognizing that we discover more of who God is and what God wants of us when we are brave enough to enter into the messy tension of exploring the fullness of our differences.

This is the heart of conflict resilience and, to me, the heart of Pope Francis’s legacy and example for a broken Church and world.

As someone who grew up Catholic and gay, I have lived with the ache of wondering whether my Church could find room for all of me in it. When Pope Francis said, “Who am I to judge?” I rejoiced, not because it changed teaching, which would simply eliminate the tension with a new dictate from on high, but because it broke open a window of possibility, welcome and voice.

By giving Catholics permission to speak their lived experiences and their differences openly, Francis legitimized interior wrestling. He made it safer to be “in process” and “in community" at the same time.

That’s a mark of conflict resilience: the ability to hold competing perspectives without collapsing into either rigidity or chaos. Francis often said that reality is more important than ideas. He understood that lived experience must shape doctrine—not in opposition to it, but in dialogue with it. He understood that unity isn’t sameness; it’s connection across difference.

He invited the Church not to choose between warm welcome and certain doctrine, but to live in the holy tension where love and truth meet

That kind of leadership takes courage. It also takes trust, in the faithful and in God’s presence amid uncertainty. Francis trusted that true discernment could only emerge from honest and brave disagreement. And so, even when he encountered resistance—especially from those who preferred the clarity of rote answers—he allowed the dissent, sometimes to the frustrations of those who advocated for faster change. He reminded us that the truths of faith should never be used as a weapon.

For LGBTQ+ Catholics and others on the margins of the Church like me, this approach has offered hope. It has invited a conversation — a space to belong, to be heard and to contribute.

“Who am I to judge?” was a provocative statement for a pope. But maybe it was also the most faithful one. Because the work of the Church is not to build walls, but bridges. Not to close doors, but to open them. Not to pronounce final verdicts, but to accompany souls on their journey toward God.

What better example of embracing holy conflict than extending a gracious audience to Vice President Vance on Easter Sunday, the day before his passing, despite his recent rebuke of Vance and his interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas's "order of love."

Pope Francis’ brilliance was in holding the keys of Peter with one hand and the outstretched hand of Jesus with the other. He invited the Church not to choose between warm welcome and certain doctrine, but to live in the holy tension where love and truth meet — the heart of what it means to be a person of faith. It is one of the many gifts Pope Francis gave to me, the Church and our ever-more-polarized world.

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