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Abuse victim says Pope Francis told him “being gay doesn’t matter”
By Inés San Martín
ROME - As part of the fallout of Pope Francis’ meeting with 34 Chilean bishops that led to the resignation of all of them, accused or at least suspected of covering up cases of clerical sexual abuse and destroying damning evidence, the survivors who met with him in April continue to share bits and pieces of their encounter with the pontiff. “Juan Carlos, that you are gay doesn’t matter,” Francis reportedly told clerical sexual abuse survivor Juan Carlos Cruz. “God made you like this and loves you like this and it doesn’t matter to me. The pope loves you like this, you have to be happy with who you are.” Cruz is one of three of the victims of Father Fernando Karadima who were in Rome in late April for a weekend meeting with Pope Francis. His comments came in an interview with Spanish daily El Pais. Cruz was answering a question about his homosexuality, and was asked if he’d spoken with the pope about it and the suffering he was subjected to as a result of it. He answered affirmatively. “They had basically told him that I was a pervert,” the survivor said. “I explained that I am not the reincarnation of St. Aloysius Gonzaga, but I’m not a bad person, I try not to hurt anyone.” Gonzaga was an Italian aristocrat who became a member of the Society of Jesus, the same religious community as Francis. Sharing an English report of the interview on Twitter, Cruz spoke about this exchange, calling it “something else that I will always remember about my hours of conversations with Pope Francis.” “His phrase: Who am I to judge? I experienced it personally and I hope many feel that no one is excluded or should be excluded…ever!” he said on the same tweet. Francis and the man abused by Chile’s most notorious pedophile priest also spoke about Cruz’s faith. “They had told him that I didn’t believe, that I was an enemy of the Church,” Cruz said in the interview with El Pais. “I told him that it enraged me, because I continue to believe, loving the Church, thinking that this can change.” He said that he’d told the pope that his faith is very important to him, and that he found it “awful” that they tried to destroy that for him. “It’s a terrible evil,” he said the pope told him in response. Cruz reportedly also told the pope that he could “have a spectacular papacy if you grab the bull by the horns and deliver a strong blow on the issue of abuse, and send out the message that the pope will not longer tolerate this.” “He told me, ‘help me so that the Holy Spirit guides me so that I know well what I have to do,’” Cruz said. The welcoming that the three men - Cruz, Jose Andres Murillo and James Hamilton - received at the Vatican on April was strikingly different to the one the Chilean bishops received last week. With the first group, Francis met each victim individually, spending two to three hours with each invididual, and then as a group on Friday. He had Father Jordi Bertomeu, one of two clerics responsible for a 2,300-report that uncovered the crimes of the Chilean hierarchy, host them while they were in Rome. With the bishops, Francis had a different attitude: Their first meeting, on Tuesday, lasted 30 minutes, and it mostly consisted on the pontiff giving them a 10-page document on which to pray and meditate. He then met with the bishops - always as a group - three more times, for an average of two hours, giving each prelate an opportunity to speak up. According to a statement released by the Chilean bishops at the end of their summit, every bishop who was in Rome, 31 in active duty, and 3 retired, handed Francis a written resignation, putting their future positions at the disposition of the pope. Based on the document he gave them, some - if not all- of those resignations will be accepted, as Francis called it a “needed” step, but not enough to clean up the Church in Chile. In its footnotes, the pope says that his envoys found mishandling of the collection of the allegations of sexual abuse by priests, of “grave negligence” in the protection of children by both bishops and religious superiors. The pope also said he was “perplexed and shamed” by the destroying of evidence and for the evident disregard of the canonical process shown in some cases. Furthermore, he said, in the case of many abusers “grave problems” had already been found during their formation, and there are also “grave accusations against some bishops or superiors who [allegedly] entrusted to these education institutions priests suspected of active homosexuality.” Though never one to question Church teaching on LGBT issues, because of Francis’s famous words - “Who am I to judge?” - on his first in-flight press conference coming back from Brazil back in 2013, he’s often portrayed as more open towards homosexuality. During that exchange with journalists, he referred to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, using that line to refer to a person who “is gay and searching for the Lord,” saying that “no one should marginalize these people for this, they must be integrated into society.” During that famous passage, the pope also said: “You must distinguish between the fact of a person being gay and the fact of someone forming a lobby, because not all lobbies are good.” Francis’s words to Cruz echo those he reportedly said to Spanish transgender man Diego Neria, who was welcomed by the pontiff privately in the Vatican in 2015: “God loves all his children, however they are; you are a son of God, who accepts you exactly as you are. Of course you are a son of the Church!”
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