Pope Francis has apologised after an outcry erupted over his alleged use of a deeply offensive slur to explain the LGBT+ community during a closed-door discussion with bishops.
The Vatican issued an announcement on Tuesday acknowledging the media storm sparked by Pope Francis’s widely reported homophobic remark. He was said to have made the comment while reaffirming the Catholic Church’s ban on gay priests.
“The Pope never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms, and he extends his apologies to those that were offended by way of a term that was reported by others,” Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni said.
The apology follows a closed-door meeting on 20 May at an Italian bishops’ conference in Rome, where certainly one of the topics discussed was whether to permit celibate gay men to undergo training for priesthood at Catholic seminaries.
The 87-year-old pope is claimed to have spoken against the thought.
He was reported within the Italian media as joking that there was already an excessive amount of frociaggine in some seminaries, which translates to a highly offensive Italian slur.
The Italian bishops conference had recently approved a recent document outlining training for Italian seminarians. The document, which hasn’t been published pending a review by the Holy See, reportedly sought to open some wiggle room within the Vatican’s absolute ban on gay priests.
The Vatican ban was articulated in a 2005 document from the Congregation for Catholic Education, and later repeated in a subsequent document in 2016, which said the church cannot admit to seminaries or ordain men who “practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called gay culture”.
Italian just isn’t Pope Francis’s mother tongue language, and the Argentine pope has made linguistic mistakes prior to now that raised eyebrows.
His apology has been welcomed by a UK Catholic LGBT+ group.
Martin Pendergast, secretary of LGBT Catholics Westminster Pastoral Council, said: “Given the media frenzy that there was around this, I feel it is rather significant that an apology has come so swiftly and he clearly recognised not only that he’s sorry for many who might need been hurt but additionally that it was homophobic language.”
Mr Pendergast said the Pope “needs to be more careful about how he phrases things, particularly in these sort of off-the-cuff remarks”. He added: “I feel he tends to make use of these slang words without understanding the ramifications they’ll have.”
He said the remark wouldn’t be a step back for relations between the church and its gay members and questioned the best way by which the comment had emerged from the private meeting.
He said: “I just wonder what the rationale was for whoever released this to the media, was it used to weaponise against the Pope’s more consistent LGBT+ welcoming approach? It would have been higher to have challenged the comment inside the meeting [rather than leaking it].”
Asked in regards to the comment, a spokesperson for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales said: “Echoing the consistent message of the Synod and this papacy, the Catholic Church is a spot of welcome for all.”
