The Pope is the infallible word of God - Catholicism isn’t a democracy. And religion is all about what should be instead of what is, so there shouldn’t be any precedence for being practical. Letting gay people be murdered so the church might splinter doesn’t seem like a fair trade. He sounds like a coward for either not taking a stand for gay people, or for just doing this to get some press in more liberal outlets.
I should say I’m nowhere near unbiased - my perspective is that religious belief is a mental illness and Catholicism has enabled genocide from its inception to today.