ITALY
Independent (UK)
Michael Day @michael2day Monday 5 October 2015
The Vatican has secretly been sending gay priests to a monastery near the Alps to be “cured” alongside paedophiles and drug addicts, it has emerged.
Priests who “show inappropriate sexual tendencies” are removed to the Venturini monastery in Trento for “a period of training, personal reflection and enlightenment”, according to Italian press reports.
The revelation came as hundreds of Catholic bishops, priests and laity began three weeks of deliberations in Rome over the church’s teachings on family life – including gay relationships – at a special synod. It followed a row at the weekend when a Polish theologian, 43-year-old Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa, was sacked from Vatican posts within hours of declaring he was gay and had a long-term partner.
British clerical abuse victim Peter Saunders, who has been appointed to a Vatican child protection commission by Pope Francis, told The Independent that the Church was too soft on paedophile priests and their protectors, and contrasted this with their swift sacking of Msgr Charamsa.
One former clergyman, Mario Bonfante, was told to go to Venturini when his superiors discovered he was gay, in order for him “to rediscover the right path” – and after he refused, he was dismissed.
The all-male institute, and its order, the Priestly Heart of Jesus, was founded by Fr Mario Venturini in 1928 in a large house in Trento, in the foothills of Alps. As many as a dozen priests can stay there.
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