Tuesday, May 28, 2024, 3:48 p.m.
The Pope apologizes to those who have felt offended because he said that homosexuals should not access the priesthood because there is already “too much faggot” in some seminaries. One day after these controversial words of Francis, spoken on May 20 during a closed-door meeting in the Vatican with members of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI), became known, the Vatican released a statement on Tuesday in which It is assured that the Pontiff did not intend to “offend” anyone nor did he intend to express himself “in homophobic terms.” It is also remembered that, as he has said on several occasions, “in the Church there is room for everyone” and no one is “useless” or “superfluous.”
The apologies of the bishop of Rome try to calm the great commotion that was produced in the Catholic Church by the term he used during his meeting with the Italian bishops who, surprised by the derogatory expression used by the Pontiff, would have leaked the content of the conversation to some local media. When asked by two prelates about the possibility of welcoming people with gay tendencies as candidates for the priesthood, the bishop of Rome responded, according to the Italian agency Adnkronos: «Look: there is an air of faggot that does no good. “Whoever has a homosexual orientation is better off not being welcomed.” In Bergoglio’s opinion, it is “very difficult” for a young gay man who enters the seminary “not to fall because they come thinking that the life of a priest can sustain them, but then they fall during the exercise of the ministry.”
Although Francis did nothing more than reaffirm with strong words the official position of the Catholic Church on this thorny issue, some theologians and Catholic homosexual movements were quick to demand that he apologize for having resorted to an expression considered denigrating for some gays and, in any case, case, hardly appropriate for a bishop of Rome. Among some of his closest collaborators, meanwhile, there was an attempt to protect the Pontiff by assuring that it had all been a kind of misunderstanding motivated because Bergoglio was not well aware of the very negative connotations that the term he used in his open dialogue with Italian has in Italian. the bishops: ‘frociaggine’ (faggot).
«Every person, regardless of their sexual condition or gender identity, can be a good priest, religious man or woman. “Sinner and called to holiness,” said the Crismhom movement, formed by members of the LGTBI+ Catholic community of Madrid. They also invited the Pontiff in a note to show “courage and firmness” in following the Gospel without “excluding or marginalizing” anyone. Gay activist and former Italian priest Francesco Lepore took the same line, accusing the Pope of “vulgarity” for having used “bar-like” language. “In my opinion the issue is not sexual orientation, but whether or not the person is capable of complying with celibacy,” Lepore said in an interview with the newspaper ‘La Repubblica’. The theologian Vito Mancuso, for his part, invited the Pontiff to “ask for forgiveness” for having set a “bad example” by using the controversial term “faggot.”
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