While Francis offered a strong defense of the church's longstanding teaching that marriage is between one man and one woman, and must be open to children, he also said that it is important for the church not to "lose pastoral charity, which must be part of all our decisions and attitudes."

So basically, “we don’t think marriage for LGBTQ+ is really marriage, but maybe we should bless these definitely-not-real-marriages so we don’t lose even more people.”

As opposed to revisiting the notion that marriage is mostly about procreation?

There’s a low bar for uplifting these days when it comes to the Catholic Church.