For all he's built up to be this reformer, what he says is basically empty and contradictory enough not to get him in too much trouble with the right and it never translates into action that would get the Church to stop promoting harmful and dangerous practices in developing countries.
This is really the heart of my gripe. There's no weight to all of these statements and it ends up falling into the territory of lukewarm Christianity which is not only the laziest kind but the worst ideologically speaking. Since most people seem to have trouble parsing Protestants from Catholics, at least in the crazyland of social media and buzzwords it ends up taking everyone along for the ride.
The happy-go-lucky everyone's a sinner and that's okay hippieisms need to be tempered with the same amount of cold reality. Francis in particular likes to talk like he's in the cool kids' club and drags his feet when it comes to serious business, coming off as two-sided and shady which means nobody actually trusts him. The last thing the Church should do is conform to what the left wants but church reform (internally) is a constant and ongoing process. The progress of the last millennium might as well be called surface cleaning.
One of the biggest problems is the thought that the Church is at war or in conflict with strict liberals/Islam/etc. when it's all just a bunch of distracting skirmishes. The whole LGBT mess is one of those.
What do you mean by the bolded? If you mean the Church constantly changes what is and isn't sin, that's not quite accurate. If you mean that the Church is slowly learning how to deal with LGBT "Catholics" (I put Catholics in quotes because people who are obstinately LGBT are not real Catholics/Christians just how people who are obstinate in any other type of sin are not real Catholics/Christians), then yes, it's reforming. ---
"Remember kid, there's heroes and there's legends. Heroes get remembered, but legends never die. Follow your heart kid, and you'll never go wrong."