LGBTQ+ Parts of Pope Francis’ Autobiography Are Censored in Russia
The cover and some inside censored pages of the Russian edition of Pope Francis’ autobiography entitled “Hope.”
All mentions of LGBTQ+ topics in Pope Francis’s autobiography, Hope, have been removed or blacked out in the recently published edition in Russia.
Francis’s Hope was published elsewhere around the world in 2025, and is only now being published in Russia. Alpina Publisher, one of the country’s largest publishing houses, released the Russian language edition. According to reports by Christians Against War, an advocacy group that opposes Russia’s war against Ukraine, entire sections of the book have been blacked out: namely, the sections that discuss LGBTQ+ issues.
TVP World reports that Natalla Vasilevich, a Belarusian human rights activist and theologian involved with the Christians Against War, has identified the censored passages as including statements by Francis that affirm gay and transgender individuals’ participation in religious and public life. These include Francis’s pronouncements that gay and transgender people are welcome in the church and that being gay is not a sin.
Other redacted sections include those in which Francis describes the many ways that he interacted with and approached the LGBTQ+ community during his pontificate, such as the allowance of non-liturgical blessings for same-sex couples and the affirmation that transgender people can be baptized and serve as godparents. All of these statements, reportedly, have either been removed or censored with solid black lines.
This recent censorship stems from a 2013 Russian law banning “popaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” says LGBTQNation. This law effectively banned Pride celebrations and outward displays of affection between gay couples, and it was expanded in 2022 to criminalize “any action or the spreading of any information that is considered an attempt to promote homosexuality in public, online, or in films, books, or advertising.”
Since the expansion of the law in 2022, over 600 books have disappeared from Russian bookstore shelves under the “LGBTQ+ propaganda” law. Now Pope Francis’s autobiography has joined this censorship purge, by being available to the Russian people only with these substantial omissions.
Several people and organizations, such as Christians Against War, are calling attention to the censorship and speaking out against it, noting the irony in the actions of editing and minimizing the message of Pope Francis which called for expansive welcoming and bridge-building.
The presence of LGBTQ+ concerns and the record of outreach to LGBTQ+ communities within Francis’s autobiography are a statement in and of itself. Even as others try to obscure it: LGBTQ+ people are part of the church, and we cannot be erased. Even in Russia.
–Phoebe Carstens, New Ways Ministry, August 28, 2026