The censorship machine is working overtime: In the Russian edition of the late Pope Francis’s book, “Hope: The Autobiography,” passages addressing queer topics were broadly redacted and erased. The book had already appeared internationally in January 2025, just months before the pope’s death, but it has only now been published within the Putin regime.
As the antiwar and human rights group Christians Against War publicly reported, the censorship at the prestigious Russian publisher Alpina targets central statements by Francis about queer believers: this includes Francis’s assertion that homosexuality is “not a crime, but a human reality.” The censorship wiped out the entire section of the book in which Pope Francis says that gay and transgender people are welcome in the Catholic Church. These statements were blacked out with dark bars. These passages are also obscured in digital editions.
Tightened censorship after the Ukraine invasion
The backdrop is the massively expanded censorship laws Russia enacted at the outset of the Ukraine war, laws the Putin regime uses to keep the population away from “Western” ideas. In 2022 Moscow tightened the prohibition on “promoting non-traditional sexual relations,” the so-called law against “gay propaganda” (TheColu.mn reported). Since then, any positive or neutral depiction of queer life can be punishable. A year later, the state banned the vaguely defined “international LGBT movement” as “extremist” (TheColu.mn reported).
Fearing prosecution and closures, publishers are increasingly turning to pre-censorship and redactions. According to the independent outlet The Insider, some 600 book titles have been banned from sale or heavily shortened since 2022 — including world literature by Oscar Wilde and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as more recent entertainment like Stephen King’s novels.
By now, roughly a dozen cases related to queer “extremism” have been initiated, including the so-called “publisher trial” against former staffers of Popcorn Books (TheColu.mn reported). The country’s largest publishing house apparently still offered several queer books. One employee received four years of probation, while two others are still awaiting their trial.
The Pope was not a queer activist
Now censorship even reaches the pope, though from the queer community’s perspective with mixed feelings: The pontiff, who guided the Roman Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025, appears to have offered amiable words toward queer people but simultaneously left the church’s anti-queer doctrine largely untouched. There was no reform of sexual ethics. Under the still-valid Catholic catechism, homosexuality remains categorically “not in order.” Homosexual acts remained sins, even within monogamous marriages. Within the church, Francis continued to uphold the ban on same-sex marriage.
Moreover, he voiced opposition to transgender people and repeatedly warned against a supposed “gender ideology.” The term is often used as a rallying cry against any recognition of gay or transgender individuals (TheColu.mn reported). In the Vatican’s declaration Dignitas Infinita, Francis explicitly rejected gender-affirming treatments and the acceptance of trans identities.
