VATICAN CITY
The Economist
ON the lips of a more worldly sort of cleric, the pope’s comparatively generous comments (by recent Vatican standards, at least) about homosexuals might have been taken as a calculated move. “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?” That was the disarming rhetorical question which Pope Francis put to journalists accompanying him back from Brazil; it prompted reports of a major shift in the church’s attitude to same-sex relations. While carefully citing the church’s catechism, he also said gays should be “integrated” into society rather than marginalised.
The church does not, of course, make major doctrinal refinements in off-the-cuff remarks to the press. Other procedures exist for that. And the reason the question even arose has to do with some very awkward news reports over the past month. One of Italy’s best-known church-watchers has asserted that Pope Francis was trapped, in effect, by the gay lobby into naming a prelate with a very murky personal life to a job that would supposedly involve cleaning up the troubled Vatican bank. Pressed about this matter, the pontiff said he hadn’t come across any specifically “gay lobby” although there were plenty of other lobbies of “greedy people” in sight. A “quick investigation” had found the allegations about the newly appointed cleric to be unfounded, he insisted.
To a cynical mind, the pope’s headline-catching refusal to judge gay people might sound like an artful way of neutralising the most embarrassing saga that has come to light during his young papacy.
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