Russia Blacked Out the Pope's Words on LGBTQ+ People. Even in Death, He's Too Queer-Friendly for Moscow.

Pope Francis spent much of his papacy, however imperfectly, nudging the Catholic Church toward gentler language on LGBTQ+ people. “Who am I to judge?” became his most quoted line for a reason. That legacy ran headfirst into Russian censorship law this month, when Alpina Publisher, one of Russia’s largest publishing houses, released a Russian-language edition of Francis’s posthumously published autobiography, “Hope,” with entire passages about LGBTQ+ people blacked out with solid redaction bars.

What got cut

Readers and independent monitors — including the Primus Versus bookstore and the “Christians Against War” advocacy group — documented the redactions in both the print and electronic editions. Among the passages removed: Francis’s statement that homosexuality is “not a crime, but a human reality,” his assertion that gay and transgender people are welcome in the Church, and his position that transgender people can be baptized and serve as godparents. The censorship wasn’t limited to the physical book — the same lines were stripped from the ebook version as well, suggesting a deliberate, systematic edit rather than a printing error or regional oversight.

Alpina hasn’t offered a detailed public accounting of its editorial decision, but the legal context makes the motive fairly transparent. Russia’s 2013 law banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” — later expanded into a near-total ban on any public discussion of LGBTQ+ identities framed as normal or positive — makes publishing material that treats queer people sympathetically a legal liability for any Russian company, regardless of who wrote it or how globally significant the author. A publisher weighing the choice between printing a pope’s own words in full or protecting itself from prosecution under a law that’s been used to shutter organizations, fine individuals, and criminalize public expression chose, unsurprisingly, self-protection.

The propaganda law’s long reach

What makes this episode notable isn’t its scale — it’s a redacted book, not a new arrest or a shuttered organization — but what it says about how thoroughly the propaganda law has reshaped ordinary commercial decision-making in Russia. The law doesn’t just ban Pride marches or target LGBTQ+ organizations directly, which is how it’s most often covered internationally. It also functions as a standing incentive for every publisher, broadcaster, and retailer in the country to pre-emptively scrub anything that might be read as favorable toward LGBTQ+ people, no matter the source. The Vatican’s own head of state, writing his own memoir, wasn’t exempt.

Russia formally designated the “international LGBT movement” an extremist organization in November 2023, a classification broad enough that authorities have used it to justify raids on gay bars, prosecutions of individuals for wearing rainbow-themed clothing or posting supportive content online, and the effective closure of what little organized LGBTQ+ advocacy infrastructure still existed in the country. Against that backdrop, a publisher blacking out a dead pope’s comments on transgender godparents is a small data point, but a consistent one: there’s essentially no public figure, however internationally revered, whose words about LGBTQ+ dignity are safe from Russian censorship once they cross into Russian print.

A church already divided on the question

The censorship also lands inside an unresolved argument within Catholicism itself about how far Francis’s outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics should be understood to go. He never changed doctrine on marriage or ordination, and conservative bishops in multiple countries spent his papacy pushing back against even his softer rhetorical gestures. But the specific passages Alpina cut — on baptism, godparents, and the basic claim that being gay isn’t criminal — represent about as uncontroversial a starting point as Francis ever offered, which makes their removal in Russia less a statement about Catholic theology than about what Russian law will tolerate regardless of who’s speaking. Even a pope, it turns out, gets edited when the subject is queer people and the publisher is Russian.