ITALY
Daily Mail (UK)
By SARA MALM FOR MAILONLINE
The Vatican has been sending homosexual priests to be ‘cured’ at a monastery in the Italian Alps, it has emerged.
Priests who come out as gay are removed to the monastery in Trento, northern Italy, by the Vatican to be ‘treated’ alongside drug addicts and paedophiles, Italian press claims.
One former Catholic priest who came out to the Vatican has revealed that he was dismissed from the church after he refused to go to the monastery to ‘rediscover the right path’.
Priests who ‘show inappropriate sexual tendencies’ are sent to the Venturini monastery in Trento for ‘a period of training, personal reflection and enlightenment’, according to Italian press reports quoted in The Independent.
The head of the monastery, Friar Gianluigi Pasto was quoted by the Independent as telling Italian newspapers that the institute was not ‘specifically for gay and paedophile priests’ but did not deny that such ‘treatments’ had taken place in the past.
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