VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
June 1, 2024
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
Pope Francis’s efforts to lessen the prominence of sexuality in his Church have crashed with the resistance of conservative leaders attacking him.
Nonetheless, this time around it was him and those closest to him who crashed with the tensions created by the Church’s doctrine on sexuality.
As a nightmare of sorts, these days the Catholic Church seems to be prone to blunders. This time around, Pope Francis himself was the main character in one of such fiascos. The pontifical faux pas emerged less than six hours after Gabriel Antonio Mestre, resigned the office of archbishop of La Plata, Argentina.
Mestre got that position when Pope Francis appointed Víctor Manuel Fernández as head of the office dealing with doctrinal integrity in the Catholic Church, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Mestre’s resignation is the byproduct of the latest black swan in the history of the mishandling of sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church.
To make matters worse, both Pope Francis’s and Mestre’s blunders, happened four weeks after the Church in Mexico lived its own public relations wreck, as told in the piece linked immediately after this paragraph regarding bishop Salvador Rangel.
On Monday, despite his record of softening the Church’s discourse and public attitudes on same-sex relations, Francis found himself the victim of a disloyal Italian bishop who decided to leak how the 87-year-old Pope called, during a private meeting with Italian bishops, to limit the ordination of gay seminarians while using a homophobic slur.
What Francis said in the private meeting, turned Catholic social media into a burning prairie on Monday. By Tuesday, the slur was the front-page story of two leading Italian newspapers, La Repubblica and La Stampa, as the images displayed immediately before and immediately after this paragraph show.
The leak first emerged in La Repubblica account over at what used to be Twitter, as seen in the message posted immediately after this paragraph, and from there it spread as a wildfire to other newspapers’ social media accounts.
The blunder forced the Vatican to issue an apology for the way Francis used the Italian homophobic slur frociaggine. Matteo Bruni, the Holy See’s Director of the Press Office, said the Pope never intended to offend, while insisting that there is “room in the Church for everyone.”
With or without slurs
Although the term is slang, Roman slang to be more precise, and some translation services render the word as harmless, making it a synonym to “smoothness”, as can be seen in the image immediately below, taken from Google Translate, its use has been deemed by Italian courts as equivalent to an insult. When talking with native Italian speakers, they describe its use as rude, even vulgar, but not as an aggressive way to talk about LGTBQ persons.
So, even if the meaning of the word is not always the same, in the context of the Pope’s words to the bishops it is a derogatory term; a homophobic way to talk about gay persons, that in the English-speaking word would be equivalent to either a “faggot” or the “faggot-ness.”
Without the slur, had Francis stuck to stating the existing rules of the Church, that for the last two decades, have been calling to prevent the ordination of gay males there would be no scandal; no need to issue an apology, even if the underlying assumption was the same: gay priests mean trouble for the Church.
It would have been business as usual in Rome and the Catholic world: A Pope repeats the unattended rules of one of his predecessors; a Pope calling a group of bishops to enforce a rule issued almost 20 years ago that, as the slur proves, the Church is unable to enforce.
Even those of us who specialize in dealing with these obscure issues of Catholicism would have been hard pressed to find “an angle” to highlight such statement. But it was not.
Again, it is not that as if Francis has a public record of using that kind of language. Quite the opposite. The main problem is that behind the disloyalty of whoever leaked the slur, there is a clear attempt at stressing the contradiction between the Pope’s public and private attitudes towards gay clerics and the LGTBQ community.
But the contradiction it is not only the Pope’s. The entire Catholic Church is hostage to its own contradiction on the issue: Unable to figure out how to deal with same-sex relationships, not only in the so-called “world,” but even within the confines of the spaces where the bishops claim to have the most control of, as the seminaries.
It is not only the “liberal” Catholic Church represented by the “Peronista Pope” Jorge Mario Bergoglio, unable to figure out how to approach same-sex attraction. It is the Church at large, as proven by John Paul II’s deaf defense of Marcial Maciel, or how he promoted Theodore McCarrick, and other known sexual predators. It was also the case with Benedict XVI’s own calamitous relation with Tony Anatrella, among other known predators.
The reveal
What the leak revealed is, on the one hand, that the Pope does not command the loyalty of the (Italian) bishops. At least one of them was more interested in outing, attacking, destroying the Pontiff.
And it is not about the Italian bishops. The same would be true of almost any meeting with leaders of the Catholic Church nowadays, as proven in the English-speaking world by bishop Strickland’s never ending attacks on Francis, as told in the story linked immediately before this paragraph or, in the Spanish-speaking world, by a recent episode, of Spanish, U.S., and Mexican priests “praying” over a YouTube broadcast for the speedy death of Pope Francis, as the story in Spanish linked immediately tells.
No wonder the next day, Corriere della Sera ran an interview with Francesco Savino, bishop of Cassano all’Jonio and one of three vice presidents of the Italian bishops’ conference, highlighting the disloyalty of the, up until now, anonymous bishop, and the corrosive effects of such attitude.
As Savino stresses to Corriere, leaking the slur furthers the divisions, some would say the schism that already exists in the Catholic Church. Savino tries to rescue Francis, talking about a Pope who is addressing fellow church leaders “in parrhesia”, a term used in philosophical and theological literature to highlight the need “to speak boldly”, “to speak frankly”.
And it was bold, because the slur stresses that even if Francis goes as far as to advocate against the criminalization of same-sex attraction, as the video immediately after this paragraph shows, he still perceives same-sex attraction as an issue that should prevent his fellow bishops from ordaining gay seminarians.
Pope Francis states there, in Italian, while traveling back to Rome his concern with the idea of criminalizing gay persons, but at no point he hints any change to Roman Catholic doctrine.
The official translation of what he says in the video is as follows:
And recently I said something—I don’t recall my exact words—in the interview with The Associated Press. The criminalization of homosexuality is an issue that must not be disregarded. It is estimated that, more or less fifty countries, in one way or another, lead to this criminalization. Some say more, let us say at least fifty.
And some of these—I think it is ten—even have the death penalty, more or less openly. This is not just. People with homosexual tendencies are children of God. God loves them. God accompanies them. It is true that some are in this state because of various situations that were not of their own choice, but to condemn a person like this is a sin…
So, even if Francis is not up for criminalizing the LGTBQ community, as his slip of the tongue proves, he sees same-sex attraction as a source of trouble for the Church.
Disloyalty
The disloyalty of the bishop “spilling the beans” stresses that contradiction and there is no way to minimize the negative effects of it.
In that regard, the most damaging aspect of the leak is not the leak itself but what is missing from that leak. What are the resorts in the Catholic Church pushing for a radicalization of the papacy stance on same-sex relations?
That problem would remain even if Francis resigned his position tomorrow because of the slur. The same and even worst contradictions shaping Francis’s slur would be there with any new Pope. There is the chance that said contradictions would be even more glaring if either Raymond Leo Burke or Robert Sarah, the darlings of the global Catholic far-right, became the new Pope. Even in the remote event of Víctor Manuel Fernández becoming Pope, something I would never bet one single buck on, the issue would remain.
The idea of rejecting gay males as priests is hardly new. Its roots go back to the early centuries of the history of the Christian Church when “pelvic matters” became the key issue for the Church in Rome, the old capital of the empire, as opposed to the bishops in the orbit of Constantinople, the then “new” capital of the Roman Empire, who were less obsessed with how their priests used their genitalia.
Although there is a long record of callings to prevent the ordination of gay seminarians, going back at least to the 12th century, when Saint Anselm is said to have called on other leaders of his Church to tone down the potential punishment on what would be called a “gay cleric” nowadays, the fact is that the Church would not exist as it is without the services of gay priests.
It exists as it is because, despite its alleged claims of chastity and outright rejection of same-sex relationships, relies on a system of education where young males live and sleep together, isolated, increasing the chances of engaging in same-sex relationships.
Gays in the Church
I cannot go over the Catholic Church’s fraught relation with human sexuality. More qualified scholars than I have been dealing with that issue. What is relevant is the change on how we talk about these issues in the civil and Catholic media, in English, Spanish and other languages.
In the early days of his pontificate, back in November 2005, Benedict XVI, issued the latest of such attempts from the Catholic Church to ban the ordination of gay seminarians.
The Instruction on the issues that bishops must consider when deciding whether to ordain a seminarian. The document bans gay people not only from the priesthood but even from the very possibility of becoming a nun or a non-ordained member of a male order in the Catholic Church.
As it is always the case in the Catholic Church, the 2005 document has exceptions. The most important is that the ordination of deacons and priests, is the sole responsibility of the bishop. As such, the bishop has full authority to accept or reject a candidate, even if there is evidence of behavior contradicting the rules set in that document.
In that regard, despite his unaccounted fame as “God’s rottweiler” Benedict XVI was hostage to the same trap Francis is: in order to keep the integrity of the Catholic Church doctrine on sexuality, they must condemn and repudiate any form of sexual behavior that goes against the Church’s doctrine.
At the same time, Benedict XVI, John Paul II or any of the Popes going back to the 12th or the 5th century, when the Bishop (Patriarch) of Rome bought the pipe dream of a sex-less clergy, cannot go ballistic on LGTBQ persons because there is no way to reconcile such bellicosity with the reality of the Catholic Church, with the core of the Gospel and, more so, with the reality of human life.
And it is not that Benedict XVI was not willing to try a solution. His 2005 document was part of his response to the clergy sexual abuse crisis. Behind it there was the then rising star of Tony Anatrella, a French priest, and psychologist.
On top of being the French bishops’ gray eminence on sexuality and family issues, Anatrella was a frequent guest in the French media, and in Church activities in Rome and elsewhere in the Catholic world. His books were translated to English, Spanish, Italian, and other languages. In those books or in his speeches to Catholic gatherings, Anatrella tried to marry Catholic doctrine with a biased understanding of scientific knowledge on human sexuality.
Sounding the alarms
It is not as if Anatrella had an unanimously acclaim. Even if he got support from the almighty archdiocese of Paris and in the Roman curia, priests with advanced degrees in theology and biblical studies, repeatedly questioned Anatrella’s understanding the most basic aspects of Catholic theology.
One of Anatrella’s early critics was French Dominican priest Phillippe Lefebvre, a professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.
Lefebvre (no relation with the founder of the far-right Society of Saint Pius X, Marcel Lefebvre), was sounding the alarms on Anatrella’s misguided theology since 2005, as he told French magazine Le Point back in 2018, when Rome finally punished Anatrella, even if only symbolically, as a priest.
Lefebvre’s critique of Anatrella goes deeper than his faulty theology or the abuse he used to perpetrate against his patients. When talking about Anatrella’s relationship with the French hierarchy, Lefebvre describes it as “an organized omerta.”
I can assure you, everyone in the episcopate already knew 13 years ago (2005) who Anatrella was. A powerful silence, an organized omerta was protecting him.
Two key members of the omerta protecting Anatrella were, on the one hand, André Vingt-Trois, archbishop of Tours (1999-2005) and of Paris (2005-17) and chair of the French conference of Catholic bishops, 2007-13 when Anatrella became the star of the French and global Catholic church in debates against gay marriage, and all the usual items of the “cultural wars” so dear to the Catholic Church during Karol Wojtyla’s and Joseph Ratzinger’s pontificates.
On the other, there was Vingt-Trois’s protégé, Michel Aupetit, auxiliary bishop of Paris, since February 2013, then bishop of Nanterre (2014-7), and later archbishop of Paris.
As a token of the many contradictions in Anatrella’s and Ratzinger’s understanding of sexuality, one must keep in mind that Aupetit resigned the office of Archbishop at the French capital back in 2021, when news about him harassing a female employee at the Parisian curia turned into a scandal.
The war on survivors
Both Vingt-Trois and Aupetit would go repeatedly to war with the French media and survivors of sexual abuse to support Anatrella. Any accusation against Anatrella would turn into a dead end, as Lefebvre and other French victims’ advocates have repeatedly denounced.
Anatrella’s “therapies” involved sessions where he abused the patients sent by their concerned bishops. Neither the French national conference of Roman Catholic bishops nor the Roman curia were willing to hear those early accusations, so Anatrella’s fame only grew during the second half of the Aughts.
When there was no way to shut down the accusations against Anatrella, Benedict XVI had already resigned as Pope, leaving Francis with the aftermath of Anatrella’s abuses.
The overall assumption of the 2005 document, of Benedict XVI’s response to the clergy sexual abuse crisis, and of Anatrella’s influence on said response is that same-gender attraction is the clergy sexual abuse crisis’ culprit.
It was in that regard that, avoiding the ordination of gay candidates to the priesthood was the safe way to avoid sexual abuse even if Francis has taken some distance from that approach, there is no way to deny that for many leaders in the Catholic Church, same-sex attraction remains a key issue when addressing the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
And, as the very slur proves, the bishops keep making exceptions, so gay seminarians are ordained.
The idea of nailing the crisis on gay persons, is an effortless way out of the crisis. Back in 2005, when most of the cases were of abuse of underage males, there was some merit to the notion. However, almost 20 years after Benedict XVI’s instruction on the ordination of priests, there is plenty of evidence of abuse against females.
Back in 2005, Benedict XVI’s instructions seemed aligned with the available evidence in the reports on the clergy sexual abuse crisis available then. It reinforced the homophobic prejudice of Catholic leaders as Benedict XVI himself, and it was a good fit for the then Pope understanding of doctrinal orthodoxy.
Ignore at your own risk
It allowed the Church to ignore the more robust critique of its overall understanding of human sexuality and the theological implications of such understanding, which neglects heterosexual abuse perpetrated against females of any age, underage girls included.
However, it is impossible to keep pushing those ideas in 2024. In the English-speaking word we have detailed accounts of females who were victims of sexual abuse going all the way back to 2002, with abuse happening even in the allegedly contained and secure confines of convents and Catholic schools and in other Christian denominations whose pastors are not under the very Catholic celibacy rule.
In the Spanish-speaking world we have now the painful evidence, a real-life nightmare, of survivors as Mexican journalist Analu Salazar, who as an underage girl was the victim of a priest member of the infamous Legion of Christ in a Catholic school, following a pattern one finds in other priests of that Catholic order in Chile and elsewhere, as in the case of Irish priest John O’Reilly (or in Spanish here).
In the German-speaking world there are the equally painful accounts of theologian and philosopher Doris Reisinger-Wagner, a survivor of sexual abuse when she was a young nun at Das Werk, the German response to the Spanish Opus Dei, a “conservative”, allegedly “rigid” religious order, which got plenty of support from Joseph Ratzinger, first and then, from Pope Benedict, despite the many reports of sexual abuse of their members.
And one only needs to search female victims of clergy sexual abuse in the French-, Portuguese-, or Italian-speaking worlds to dispel any notion about gay priests as the culprits of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
In that regard, the main problem with Pope Francis’s use of the Italian slur frociaggine, it is not that Francis is a closeted homophobe, who came out while having drinks with his friends at a bar.
Again, he has gone to war with his own bishops and cardinals, especially those in Africa, who are more than willing to support the criminalization of gay persons, and who go as far as to imply Francis and his closest advisors betray the Church’s doctrine when rejecting the criminalization of same-sex relationships.
The main problem is the cognitive dissonance not only when considering Catholic doctrine on human sexuality as compared to the reality of human sexuality.
The main problem is that the Church will never address the true nature of the clergy sexual abuse crisis if it remains obsessed with the very fifth-century idea of having “sex-less clerics”, the idea that brought the first divisions in what was, up until then, a unified Church.
All the mess, the clusterfuck of sorts that the Pontifical slur revealed, are just a derivative of that cognitive dissonance.
Figures
There is no official as to what is the share of gay Roman Catholic priests and numbers vary widely. The Los Angeles Times commissioned one of the most valued surveys of Catholic clergy in the last three decades back in 2002, when the clergy sexual abuse crisis ravaged the Catholic Church in the United States.
The survey, available here (and also here), with an in-depth analysis here, found that at least 15 percent of the priests responding the poll saw themselves as “completely or mostly” gay. Other analysis of Catholic clergy in the United States and elsewhere set a higher share of gay clergy.
Back in 2015, Polish theologian Krzysztof Charamsa, then forty-three, resigned his position in the then Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith, to protest what he called “frequently violent homophobic, insensitive, unfair, and brutal” attitudes of the Church’s hierarchy towards gay clergy.
He went as far to stress the paradox of such attitudes coming from an organization where key positions are hold by significant numbers of gay men. Although Charamsa never mentioned him it one of such gay clerics in top positions within the Church is the now laicized former archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick.
Three years after Charamsa’s resignation, on March 2018, Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe proved how insensitive the Church could be. Sepe, then archbishop of Naples, Italy, publicly announced he was sending a 1,200-page report to Rome.
The report detailed the names of at least 40 Italian priests involved at different points with a male escort. Sepe’s announcement was more relevant since he was, from 1992 through 2001, the secretary of the Congregation of the Clergy within the Roman curia. Despite the noise, good enough to grab headlines in the United Kingdom media, nothing happened with Sepe’s report.
Later, in July 2018, Rome suspended from public ministry then Cardinal McCarrick. Way before Pope Paul VI appointed him auxiliary bishop of New York City in 1977, as early as 1971, seminarians and young priests under his care accused him of sexually abusing them.
Contradictions
The public denunciations of said abuse became public in 2008, when Richard Sipe published an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI providing details of McCarrick abuse of younger males.
Sipe published in 2010 an essay, going deeper into McCarrick’s career as a sexual predator, although it was only in 2018, after The New York Times published detailed accounts of two of McCarrick’s victims, that Pope Francis opened a formal probe that led to his suspension, and later, in 2019, to his laicization.
In any case, the slur stresses a contradiction between Francis’s attempt at redirecting his Church’s public discourse and attitudes regarding gay persons and the reality of Catholic doctrine and practice that remains an active source of homophobia in religious and civil discourse.
The chances of Francis changing Catholic doctrine are non-existent. Only delusional characters writing in far-right outlets obsessed with “communism” would be willing to believe he is either “liberal,” “Peronista,” or “leftist.” What he has done, the source of the Catholic far-right anger towards him, is that he is not willing to lead the lynching of LGTBQ persons.
They say there are some there. I believe that when you are dealing with such a person, 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. This one is not good. If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge him?
Even if he appeared, back in 2013, as a refreshing voice in the Church when he answered a question about a “gay lobby” in Rome with these words on his way back to Rome, there is no way to see him as a driver of any major doctrinal change in the Catholic Church.
Pope Francis’s response then, as much as the frociaggine-affair proves, eleven years after, that the Roman Catholic Church is the hostage of a maze of contradictory doctrine, attitudes, and practice regarding human sexuality built by the Church itself.
As former Irish President Mary McAleese said of Francis, he is “a conservative leader” who is blessed with enemies who make him look more liberal than he is.
Provocateur
After his 2013 statement during the flight back to Rome, Francis talked with Antonio Spadaro, a fellow Jesuit and then chief-editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, and, as one of other issues, he went back to his statement on same-sex attraction:
A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: “Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?” We must always consider the person.
Five years after his trip to Brazil, in 2018, Francis made headlines again when answering a question dealing with same-sex attraction, once again during an in-flight press conference, when going back from Ireland to Rome.
Asked about the attitude that parents must have when dealing with the sexual preferences of their offspring, Francis showed the kindest approach possible without rejecting official Roman Catholic doctrine.
He acknowledged the issue and said:
I would tell him, first of all, to pray. Pray. Do not condemn, dialogue, understand, make room for his son or daughter. Make room for them to say what they have to say. Then too, at what age does this concern of the child become evident?
This is important. It is one thing when it shows up in childhood when there are so many things that one can do to see how the matter stands; it is another when it is shows up at twenty years of age or so. But I would never say that silence is the answer; to ignore a child with a same-sex preference is not good parenting.
Do not throw them out of family. This is a serious challenge for parenthood.
Despite Francis’s unwillingness to challenge the doctrine on the issue, the Pope’s response was enough to rekindle the fire of perpetual anger from the leaders of the Catholic far-right, same way it happened when, back in December 2023, Francis made headlines when he approved Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández’s document known in Catholic circles by its Latin-language title of Fiducia Supplicans (available here).
The document merely opened a window to allow for non-ritualized blessings of so-called “irregular couples”, a far cry from what German laypersons and priests have asked from Rome since 2023, that makes them the target of criticism and anger from the Catholic far-right in the United States and Latin America.
Despite the symbolic nature of this document, the Catholic radical far-right sees it as a betrayal, and there lies the reason behind the anonymous leak to La Stampa and La Repubblica.